


a resistance jacket torn to shreds, and a dream inside our heads

by folkloricfeel, jannika



Series: a tape recording of the sound of the rebel underground [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: "Slow Burn" is an understatement for this whole verse tbh, (We're getting there we promise just ride along with us), Alternate History, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, And by that we mean he's a nerd who romanticizes music history, F/M, Gen, He named his dog after a vinyl record's catalogue code, If that tells you what you're getting into here, M/M, Mentions of period-typical sex drugs and rock&roll, Mentions of the original trio and beyond, Multi, Poe is a self-proclaimed member of the Resistance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-21 03:18:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6035872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folkloricfeel/pseuds/folkloricfeel, https://archiveofourown.org/users/jannika/pseuds/jannika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>By the time he’s fifteen, Poe has an old, beat-up guitar, a steadily-growing record collection, a dozen books on Resistance Records, five hours of footage from old shows at the Millennium Falcon downloaded to his laptop, and fourteen vintage magazines. He likes to think it’s a passion, not an obsession.</i>
</p><p>Poe is a self-proclaimed punk and a rebel with a cause, Rey is a scrappy foster kid who's found a niche, and Finn is an overachiever on the verge of a breakdown. This is the story of their senior year. (High school AU, but not really, because the story's just getting started.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://bestmixtapeintherecorder.tumblr.com/post/138543801377/rthko-a-lot-of-people-are-picturing-poe-and-finn#notes) Tumblr post, which has accidentally spawned a sprawling universe and a decades-long story. This fic is the first part of that story.
> 
> All title lyrics, here and otherwise, taken (edited slightly) from "Soft Revolution" by Stars.

_[excerpts from Scream Until It All Falls Down: 30 Years of Resistance Records, A Retrospective, c.2005]_

_It was 1977, the year it all fell down._

 

By the time he’s fifteen, Poe has an old, beat-up guitar, a steadily-growing record collection, a dozen books on Resistance Records, five hours of footage from old shows at the Millennium Falcon downloaded to his laptop, and fourteen vintage magazines. He likes to think it’s a passion, not an obsession. His father has told him that’s a debatable point--especially after Poe had insisted on naming his bouncy Corgi puppy BB-8 after the catalogue number of the original vinyl release of _Death Star_ \--but Poe thinks it’s a good use of his time, a thing worth a little passion. He’s stayed up nights reading every word he can find, everything from actual books to internet message board threads, drinking in everything he can. He watches clips of Leia Organa, face as intense as it is stunning, as she sings, watches Han Solo surveying his club with a gleam in his eyes, watches Luke Skywalker, animated and telling stories that make everyone on the old grainy footage burst into laughter. Poe loves it. All of it. He loves the interior of the Falcon, with its kitschy, space-themed decor and stage that had been home to legends, he loves the idea that playing a single show there could make a career. He loves to imagine acts nervously playing, hoping for the approval of not just the crowd, but that famed back booth filled with Han Solo and all his friends.

 

_Resistance Records was two years into its tenure on the Manhattan punk scene, an upstart label with less than a dozen singles to its name, the night the Rebel Alliance broke big at the Millennium Falcon in the summer of 1977. While not officially affiliated with the label, the legendary nightclub’s ties to Resistance Records ran deep--the label’s origins can be traced to a 1974 house party at Solo’s Lower East Side apartment where founders Gial Ackbar and Carlist Rieekan met. Solo was listed as a consulting director for the label until the Falcon’s closing in 1996, an unofficial title that officially made him a gatekeeper of sorts to the scene, as a well-received show at the Falcon and the approval of its owner was often the first step for acts signed throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s._

 

It’s not even just the music, as Poe has tried to explain to so many people: it’s the feeling of it all, the legend. It’s these people. It’s Leia Organa and Han Solo famously kissing on stage in 1980, it’s the story of how Luke Skywalker and Leia had been accidentally set up on a blind date that made them best friends years before they learned they were actually twins. It’s the way the gossip about the time is the sort Poe has not heard about anyone else--that maybe Han Solo and Luke Skywalker had an affair, that maybe the Falcon had mafia ties. It’s the spirit, too: the politics and the movement, the lyrics about changing the whole world--or at least New York--the way Leia Organa has gone on to actually do just that. It’s the way the Falcon was a more welcoming atmosphere than a lot of places are today--there are so many pictures of people who are so diverse, races and sexualities and economic statuses blending together in the images into one scene, one family of people who belonged to the Falcon as much as it belonged to them.

 

_On August 3, 1977, punk upstarts the Rebel Alliance took to the Falcon’s stage and started a riot that would ripple through New York’s underground music scene--and beyond--for decades to come. Comprised of four female members--lead singer Leia Organa was a mere nineteen years old at the time--the Rebel Alliance more than proved they could rock out and keep up with the best of Manhattan’s punk boys. The aftermath of the show, along with the breakout success of the band’s 1978 LP release Death Star (eventually becoming the label’s first gold-certified release in 1980) forever cemented the place of Organa, Solo, and the Falcon as part of the label’s mythos, and, by extension, the DIY scene of New York musicians, artists, and anti-establishment rebels it came to represent._

 

Poe wants to be there.

Wants to stand in a club that closed before he was born and feel the music of the Rebel Alliance pumping through the floors, wants to see Leia Organa herself onstage, wants to feel what that was like. Wants to kiss a stranger on the club’s makeshift dancefloor, wants to smoke in a booth and throw back a drink and watch legends parade in front of him. He’s fifteen and he sits in his bedroom in his small town in upstate New York and he plays the records until he feels like it’s true, even if the Falcon is a fucking Pinkberry now, of all things. He just wants so much to be part of it, somehow.

So he finds all he can, buys everything he can find and that his part-time job will allow.

 

_Three decades have come and gone since Organa first screamed into a microphone and shouted her way into the hearts of Falcon patrons. Many more successful artists have graced Resistance Records’ catalogues, from the post-punk jangles of Mon Remonda to the Siouxsie-inspired proto-goth of the Nightsisters, the raucous arena-ready anthems of Kessel Run and the laid-back stoner vibes of 90s indie rockers Sabacc. Indie rock’s royalty has stepped through the label’s doors from time to time, most notably in the form of a 2002 dual-album compilation of b-sides from the riot grrrl scene, curated by none other than Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Yet somehow, this fabled precursor to indie giants from Matador to Sub Pop is still most associated in the eyes of pop culture history with a trio of Manhattan’s ‘77 royalty--club owner and international businessman Solo, punk-princess-turned-politician Organa, and a farmboy from small-town Pennsylvania who took Manhattan by storm with his signature floppy haircut and flamboyant disco moves--none other than, of course, Studio 54’s own Luke Skywalker._

 

His collection is largely from garage sales and flea markets, treasures other people had let collect dust, with a few special items in better condition tracked down on the internet. He’s hoping to add more--he wants t-shirts, buttons for his favorite jacket, things that he can take with him during the day. So far, he’s not had much luck. The best he’s managed is getting the Organa for Senate campaign to send him free stickers a few months back. And while he’d loved those and had passed them out to everyone who would listen to a teenager talk about a politician in a precinct they didn’t live in, they’re not quite the same.

 

_How a sometimes-drag-queen, a current member of New York’s City Council, and a reclusive club owner with long-rumored ties to organized crime came to be emblematic of one of the greatest American indies of the end of the 20th century, especially when none held a title on the label’s staff higher than the intermediate director level, is one of the label’s most charming, and most discussed, mysteries. Perhaps it was Solo’s 1982 marriage to Organa that struck a romantic nerve; Solo’s quote that he knew, in retrospect, he had fallen in love with the electric performer after two songs and two rounds in a booth at the back of the club is, surely, enough to warm the heart of even the most hardened punk cynic. Perhaps it was Skywalker’s induction into the Falcon’s innermost circles, through his fated friendship with Organa and his subsequent influence on label signees, that broke down doors for queer artists to cross over into genres previously inaccessible for those outside of the straight white heteronorm; singer Tegan Quin recently told Pitchfork, of course, that without the label’s inclusive, queer-positive policies influencing the politics of marketability to the mainstream, her band would never have been nominated for a Juno Award._

 

It’s winter when he thinks of it, sitting in his room, listening to his slightly-scratched but still-playable copy of _Fall of the Empire_ and plucking guitar chords aimlessly, unfinished homework open on his bed and fallen to a notebook page that is more doodles than actual class notes. The doodles, and the record, and his guitar, give him the idea, and he jumps up, already pleased with it. He pulls a large coffee-table style book off his shelf and opens it to a place where he knows there is a full-page Resistance Records logo, grinning. One day he will use his guitar for something more than the halfhearted band he and his friends, Karé, Iolo, and Muran, sometimes pretend they have. One day maybe he’ll learn to play his own songs and not just play covers of the same twenty punk songs. Maybe one day he could even be on a stage somewhere himself--an aimless dream he’s not ever even sure if he wants for reasons beyond his Resistance Records fixation--but that sounds good sometimes, anyway. For now, though. For now he thinks maybe his guitar can at least look the part.

 

_Or, perhaps, Organa and Skywalker and Solo were simply the right people at the right time to define a movement--young, charismatic, idealistic, seemingly as madly in love with each other as all of Manhattan was with them for a brief, beautiful moment in 1977. As Skywalker famously told VH1 in 1999, it was a sentiment shared by everyone swept up in the Falcon’s social circle:_

_“Would I do it all over again, even in spite of the hard times, even knowing AIDS and Reaganomics and all that were right around the corner? Absolutely, without a doubt. I would savor every moment of it all over again, I would make the same mistakes with those same people, glitter on my face and screaming along with a song off Fall of the Empire. Absolutely I would, it’s not even a question. Those were the best adventures I ever had, and everyone who was part of making them with me was the love of my life, too.”_

 

Two days later, he rides his bike across town to the college screenprint shop, where he makes a copy of the image, and then a vinyl decal, big enough to take up the entire front of his guitar case. He sticks it on before he even leaves the shop, not able to wait to see it. His guitar case is now completely dominated by the symbol of Resistance Records, like maybe he is part of something that was over before he was even born. Like maybe he’s joined a movement.

Like maybe now he’s a part of the Rebel Alliance.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings for: detailed descriptions of panic attacks (including physical symptoms), mentions of unstable living environments and issues within the foster system.

Finn is seventeen years old, he’s a high school senior, he’s at the top of his class academically, he’s varsity in two sports, he’s broken three district cross-country records since his sophomore year, he’s on exactly four student committees. He’s been a JROTC cadet since freshman year, he’s got a early college admissions acceptance letter and a ROTC-sponsored scholarship he just received this week to go with it. He’s got the admiration of his teachers and coaches, he’s got constant reminders in the back of his head in his mom’s voice about what an honor it will be when he joins the army like his father had. He’s got a legacy to live up to--and hopefully actually live through, in his case. He’s got every piece of documentation imaginable, connected to so many things sitting in front of him. It’s October and he’s sitting in the guidance office, and his counselor, Ms. Phasma, is setting papers in front of him, and, and, and--

“You’ll probably be valedictorian, of course, so that’s something to keep in the back of your mind. Last year’s valedictorian started writing their speech in their junior year. Have you had any thoughts?” She’s speaking with that strong, cold voice that’s always made Finn feel a little intimidated, and suddenly the words are blurring, both the ones she’s saying and the words on the page, blurring together and scrambling--

“What are you considering as a major?” She taps her pen on the desk, leafing through papers in a way that makes Finn feel like each _click_ is chipping away at the confidence of his responses, making him sweat and making it all blur even more. “It never hurts to have a plan early. Of course, you also need to be thinking about your service commitment now that you have that scholarship and--”

And Finn can’t breathe.

Just like that, he can’t breathe, he’s gasping for air and the office is spinning and the words are still blurring and he wants to scream at the top of his lungs because it’s all too much. It’s all too much, and he doesn’t know what to do or say or feel and he’s so hot and he’s freezing all at the same time and he’s hyperventilating and--

And then he’s running, he’s getting up out of his chair, hearing himself mumble excuses about feeling sick and needing to run to the restroom, he’s willing himself not to keep replaying Phasma’s look of tight-lipped confusion and stern comments about needing to reschedule to finish their meeting as soon as possible, and he’s fisting his fingers tight around the strap of his bag, and he’s running, dizzy, heart thumping out of his chest--running until he’s at the track, or behind it, that is, at the little dip in the hill behind the bleachers--and Finn stops there, or is stopped, because he almost runs into someone standing there. He’s so consumed by the panic in his head that he almost doesn’t see the guy until he’s about half a step away and the guy is quickly stomping out a cigarette underneath his Doc Martens.

“Whoa, hey,” the guy is saying, and putting out a hand to him. Finn skids and doesn’t really breathe when he gasps out a response.

“Sorry,” he says, and reaches a hand out to grab the metal pole holding the bleachers to the ground, needing to steady himself. It doesn’t really work.

“You okay there, buddy?” the guy asks. Finn is in no place to tell if this guy is being sincere or sarcastic. He thinks he’s still shaking a little.

“Not really,” Finn says, “sorry.”

“Do you want anything? A cigarette? Half a sandwich?” the guy says, and, okay. That probably was sincere. Finn looks up and studies the guy he’d nearly run into, a tiny ping of recognition in his head as he does. This guy is definitely also a senior, in a totally different social circle than Finn’s, but familiar anyway, and his name is on the edge of Finn’s brain somewhere. He might know it, if he could breathe right now. The guy is about his height, he’s got headphones around his neck and he’s--Finn searches his brain for that word, too, throwing out _rebel_ and _trouble_ and a _bad boy_ because it’s not actually 1955 and none of it is right anyway, before landing on a better label: _punk_.

“Um, no, that’s okay. Thanks,” Finn says. The guy nods and puts a hand on Finn’s arm, smiling, and, weirdly, it helps. Between the cool metal of the pole and the warmth of this stranger’s hand, Finn tries to ground himself.

“What’s your name?” the guy asks after a minute, like maybe he’d been letting Finn have a pause to breathe.

“My name?” Finn looks down at the patch on the sleeve of his JROTC jacket. “FN-2187,” he responds sarcastically, because a number in a system he doesn’t want to be in is about all he feels like right now.

“FN-2187?” The guy smirks and shakes his head knowingly. “I’m just going to call you Finn instead, that alright with you?”

“What?” Finn asks, startled. That actually helps too, the being startled. He can feel himself start to press back together a little.

“We have AP History together,” the guy says, with another quick smirk, eyes locked on Finn’s. “Want mine instead?”

“Your what?” Finn asks again. He’s not sure what he’s asking, even, not sure if they’re talking about why the guy had asked his name when he already knew or what he means by _want mine instead_ or--

“My jacket,” the guy says, sliding out of his leather jacket before Finn can even respond, “I’m Poe, by the way.”

“Um,” Finn manages. He did know that, now that it’s been said. He knew this guy’s name was Poe. He’s sure he did. He looks at the jacket and, even though it feels irrational and ridiculous, he takes it, pulling his own off and sliding into it.

The effect is instant. Somehow, in this jacket, brown leather with reddish patches and covered in buttons and pins, Finn feels like a different person. Like taking off his number had made him different. Like in this jacket, he could be someone else, anyone else. Someone with less pressure. Finn breathes for another long minute, and Poe lets him.

“Thanks,” Finn says when he can, smiling gratefully.

“It seemed like it would help,” Poe says, smiling back. Finn nods rapidly.

“I don’t know why, but it does,” Finn says. “Sorry for, for all of this.”

“Don’t be,” Poe says. “Bad day?”

“I’m not even sure,” Finn says, deciding on full disclosure, because for the cigarettes and the patches and the punk thing, this Poe already has a genuineness, a calmness about him that makes him feel more at ease than he has the whole school year thus far, even in spite of the whole panic attack thing. “I just couldn’t do it anymore. I ran out of a guidance meeting.”

“This senior stuff is rough,” Poe says, sympathetically. Finn sort of wants ask him to hold his arm again, but he doesn’t, because that would be weird. He thinks. He doesn’t know much of anything right now. The jacket is more than enough, really. “Most of my friends graduated last year, so.” Poe says, shrugging.

“I’m not sure most of my friends actually like me,” Finn offers back to that.

“I doubt that,” Poe says, looking down just a little as he does, then right back at Finn’s face, eyes bright.

“I think,” Finn says and then stops, running his hands over the leather of the jacket he has on, finding it really helpful to give him the courage to actually say the words out loud: “I think I have to turn down my scholarship, I don’t think I can do it.”

“Better now than in a year, right?” Poe offers. Finn shakes his head. He reaches his hands into the pockets of the jacket before he thinks about it, before he realizes that’s probably an invasion of privacy.

“It would be too late then,” Finn says, wincing, and then wincing again as his fingers hit a folded-up slip in the pockets and he pulls it out, in case it’s something Poe needs right now. Poe sighs when he sees it before Finn even realizes it’s a detention slip, and he flushes, “shit, sorry.”

“Apparently, at this school, it’s against policy to wear anything that might incite political debate among your fellow students, especially on any ‘hot-button issues,’” Poe says, making air quotes and ducking down to flip over the flap of his messenger bag, revealing another array of pins. These seem angrier, more slogans than band names, more political candidates than musicians. Finn’s eyes widen a little.

“You got detention for that?” Finn asks. Poe rolls his eyes.

“Repeated warnings. I also might have pointed out that I’ve seen half a dozen people in t-shirts with Confederate flags or racist punchlines this week alone, and that I was wondering if they’d all be talked to as well.” He bites his lip. “It didn’t go over well.”

“Want me to get you out?” Finn asks, making Poe let out a surprised laugh. “I’m on the peer discipline board. I could just. ‘Erase the incident,’” he says, echoing Poe’s earlier gesture back to him.

“Really?” Poe asks, eyes wide in a way that makes Finn feel happier than he has in a long time.

“Sure, if you want,” Finn says, grinning. “It’d only be the right thing to do.”

“Well,” Poe pauses, like he’s considering, “as much as going to detention for a good cause sounds like a really badass story, I was going to have call off work. And I’m broke, so.”

“Consider it done,” Finn says, thinking that there might be an advantage or two to his overachiever status after all.

“It’s a better story that way, anyway,” Poe says, smiling again. From the school building, a bell rings, and the moment breaks a little. Finn shrugs and starts to pull off Poe’s jacket.

“Here,” he says, but Poe shakes his head and stops him.

“No, keep it. It suits you,” Poe says, “and I think you need it right now.”

He bites his lip again, and then smiles that same bright smile, and Finn thinks maybe he does need it. Maybe the jacket will keep him brave enough to gain some control. Maybe the jacket will help him quit a thing or two, talk to his mom, turn down a scholarship that comes with too much attached.

“Besides, you saved my life,” Poe offers to Finn’s nod. “Or saved me from detention, anyway.” Finn laughs. He thinks that maybe it’s not just the jacket. He thinks maybe he was wrong--that maybe he does have a friend who actually likes him now, instead of ones who tolerate him out of respect for his status at the school. Even if that friend has only known him for half a lunch period.

It’s a start.

*

Finn is running late.

He’s not used to it, the being off-schedule thing, and it makes him feel out of sorts and exhilarated all at once. Everything has been in such freefall lately, especially now that he thinks he’s going through with the decision to turn down his scholarship. It’s not been easy to break away--not at school, and at home least of all--but the fallout is better than the structures that had been holding him up for so long, those thick walls and binding ropes wrapped around him so tight he’d barely been breathing.

He’s breathing again, if sometimes all in gulps, too fast and wheezing, but it’s a start, at least.

For all the ways it’s great, though, it still terrifies him a little every time he makes another choice and breaks away from one of those structures, even one as insignificant as not being twenty minutes early for a bus call time for the first regional meet of the season. He slides onto the bus, duffle over his shoulder and exhausted from jogging the last three blocks to school. There are no empty seats, and eyes turn to him, somewhere between glares and looks of surprise, because he’s never late. He scans the seats, looking at faces he knows, friendly acquaintances that he doesn’t want to make to small talk with, not today. So, on a quick impulse, he heads toward the back and slides in next to a girl he doesn’t really know, headphones in her ears and scuffed combat boots resting on the bus seat in front of her.

She raises an eyebrow but nods and scoots over a little, eyes on him intently as he sits and mutters apologies and offers to get back up, to go somewhere else. She shakes her head, eyes still burning into him. He’s pretty sure her name is Rey, and that she’d only joined wrestling this year after a fight with another girl in the halls had been broken up by the coach. He think she’s only been at their school since junior year. He thinks no one really knows a lot about her. He thinks no one really knows a lot about him, either.

“Sorry,” he says again, shoving his bag under his foot. She sighs at him.

“Stop apologizing,” she says, rolling her eyes and pulling her headphones out, hitting pause on her phone--an older model, Finn notes, screen cracked and headphones in a knot.

“It just seemed like maybe you wanted to be alone,” Finn says. She shakes her head.

“It’s okay,” she says, then tilts her head at him like she’s considering again. “You seem like you don’t want to be alone, so.”

“I’m, um, I’m Finn, uh. Sorry again,” he says, stumbling and a little thrown.

“I”m Rey,” she says, a small smile on her face, just the corners of her lips lifted up, but enough that it makes Finn pause again and look at her again, smiling back a little.

“You don’t have to to talk to me or anything, I’ll let you go back to your music,” Finn says, gesturing. The bus roars to life up front, and a parent volunteer takes a quick headcount to the faint sound of grumbling teenagers shifting in their seats.

“Are you always late?” Rey asks, eyes curious, like she really doesn’t know his reputation, like maybe she honestly doesn’t pay attention to things like that. Finn instantly envies that, and feels more comfortable. He briefly considers his options, considers the new start he could have with this friendship, yet another hope for breakaway.

“Oh, absolutely,” he says, nodding, “yep, that’s me. Always late. The latest of them all.” He leans back against the seat, putting an elbow on the back cushion for effect and whispering conspiratorially. “I’m a rebel that way. Bad boy, really. You’d better be sure you want to be seen with someone like me.”

“So, first time?” Rey smirks, and Finn sighs.

“I’ve actually never been late before,” he admits, shrinking back. “For anything.”

“This is the start of your rebellious phase?” Rey asks, eyebrows raised. Finn shakes his head.

“Not exactly--or I don’t think so, anyway,” Finn says, and Rey laughs, quick and quiet and lighting up her face in a way that makes Finn stare again.

“Too bad. I hear they’re supposed to be fun,” Rey says.

“I’ve heard that,” Finn says, running his fingers, almost instinctively, over the soft leather of Poe’s jacket, hitting on buttons for things Poe loves, bands and labels and causes Finn still doesn’t really have a grasp on. (He should probably give those back, he thinks. The buttons, anyway, even if Poe won’t take the jacket.)

“You should go for it, then,” Rey says. Her eyes are watching his fingers, bright and curious now.

“I think I’m doing enough, I, um, I was in a meeting and I--” Finn stops and shakes his head again, meeting her eyes. “Sorry, wow, you don’t care. I don’t want to bore you.”

“No, go on,” Rey says. She keeps smiling these little smiles, almost in spite of herself, it seems, and Finn feels like he’s counting them, which he then feels like is weird and maybe he should stop, but he doesn’t.

“Seriously?” Finn asks, putting his hands together in front of him, lacing his fingers.

“You sat with me,” Rey shrugs, “I’ll bite. I’m curious.”

Finn starts to talk, to tell a story he doesn’t really understand himself yet, when the bus jolts to a hard stop, shaking them both, and a voice yells that they’re making an impromptu stop because they seem to be having some mechanical trouble. Rey stays by his side when they get off the bus, and they walk for a bit, the story pouring out more, the first time he’s ever really formed it this way: his family, the pressures, the weight of it all, the way thinking about becoming an _actual soldier_ had made him actually throw up (something that makes Rey wrinkle her nose and nod rapidly like she’s agreeing), meeting Poe and that day and the freefall--a tumble of words as they walk in circles around a shitty little rest stop.

They almost miss the bus coming back--they’re rounding the corner, Rey starting to talk a little about herself, closing up at mentions of family, Finn notices, but opening back up again about the wrestling team and the way that’s been better than she thought--when they see the bus start to pull out of the parking lot. Finn grabs her hand and takes off running, yelling. He’s thinking that if they miss the bus, they’ll be stranded here and he doesn't even know where here is, and it will be all his fault, this is what happens when you let yourself run late for things, and now he’s dragged her into this by sitting down with her and--

“I know how to run without you holding my hand,” Rey says from beside him, but she doesn’t pull away, and the bus, thankfully, comes to a halt, and they slide back into their seats. There are probably glares, but Finn doesn’t notice them this time. They talk the whole way to the meet. He counts every smile.

*

Rey shoves four brochures from her guidance counselor into her backpack, frowning. Apparently, she’s already being scouted--schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even as far away as Indiana are looking at her for their programs, talking about scholarships already. She has to get through the season, has to keep her grades up, and not just in the classes she likes, has to retake her SATs, but it’s already looking likely that she’ll actually be able to go to college. Rey shakes her head a little, wanting some air, and pushes out the school doors, digging her headphones out of her pocket as she does.

It’s sort of a scary prospect, the concrete idea of college. She’s not sure she wants to go to Pennsylvania or anywhere else, but she’s never really given it that much thought. She’s been living so day to day, surviving every single day, that she hasn’t had much time. At least not lately. When she was young, she’d wanted to--dreamed about going big places and doing big things, but it’s been. It’s been harder lately to dream much of anything. She rarely knows where she’s sleeping from night to night--technically, having a home, having people the state says are supposed to care for you, is not the same as having security. But now, with the wrestling team--she certainly hadn’t thought some scuffle to defend herself in the hallway would lead to possibilities being opened again in a real way. It’s more than a little daunting.

She makes it about as far as the side wall by the bike rack and the broken light fixture, comforting herself a little with the first few bars of "Lithium," when Finn catches her, running to her like he’d seen her leave the doors.

“Hey,” he says, all smiles today. Rey smiles back.

“Hi,” she says, pulling her headphones back out of her ears and leaning against the wall. Talking to Finn has instantly become one of those things that always makes her feel better. Probably because he’s the first real friend she’s had since middle school.

“Do you want to run laps with me?” Finn asks, once her music is paused. That’s a thing they’ve been doing lately, another thing that always makes Rey feel better. She wouldn’t have thought working out with someone would be a thing she’d enjoy, but she really does.

“Definitely,” Rey says, nodding quickly.

“Are you okay?” Finn asks, studying her like her stress is showing on her face.

“College stuff, scouts,” Rey says, waving her hands vaguely. Finn nods.

“That’s good though, right?” Finn asks.

“Just a lot to think about,” Rey says. Finn grimaces a little, and Rey knows he gets it, the enormity of it all.

“You deserve to be scouted, you know, to go somewhere awesome,” Finn says, in that encouraging way he has--not pressure, just genuine. That thing he does that makes Rey thinks she has never known someone quite so nice, someone she would call nice with actual sincerity. She smiles back, ducking her head a little. There’s a sharp breeze picking up, swirling piles of wet damp leaves and making Rey shiver.

“I guess,” Rey says, shrugging noncommittally. Finn grins again, quick, and then shoulders out of his jacket.

“Cold?” he asks, holding the soft, worn-looking leather out to her.

“That’s not even your jacket to give,” Rey says, even as she reaches for it.

“To share, I think it is,” Finn shoots back, grinning. Rey frowns a little, but the wind picks up again and she sighs, reaching for it.

“It is cold,” she says, sliding on the jacket, instantly warmer. It’s big on her, soft and a little threadbare at places, and it smells both familiar--the warm cinnamon and pine smell that Finn always carries--and foreign, like someone she doesn’t know at all.

“Better?” Finn asks, staring at her in the jacket and looking pleased.

“Yeah,” she admits, “it is a nice jacket.”

“It is,” Finn agrees, then his eyes flick to her shoulders and he reaches out, fixing a place where the collar had folded over. His fingers are even warmer on her skin than the jacket, little pressure points that make Rey smile even as she rolls her eyes at the gesture.

“Thanks,” Rey says, meeting his eyes. Finn moves a hand down to her arm, and Rey smiles but then shakes her head and says, “you’re sure your punk-rock-wannabe boyfriend won’t mind me wearing it?” to break the moment a little. Finn laughs, embarrassed.

“You’ll like Poe,” Finn says, “and it’s not like that.”

“Sure,” Rey says, fondly. She honestly has no idea if it’s like that it or not--she can’t get a read, and she doesn’t see how it’s that important. She does think the jacket thing is maybe a little. Well. Something like that. Then again, she’s standing here in that very same jacket right now. So maybe it’s not at all.

“Want to go run?” Finn says, taking his hand off her arm.

“Let’s go,” Rey says, smiling again. She picks her bag back up and sticks her hands in the pockets of the jacket, ready to go run until her lungs hurt and she’s too tired to think about college at all.

*

Finn brings Rey on impulse, tugging at her hand and bringing her with him after lunch to the spot he’s been meeting Poe at for weeks. It’s strange, but he thinks that even though he’s only known them both for about a month, they’re both already so _important_ \--he likes them both so much, they both feel so different from anyone else he’s ever known, and he really wants them to like each other. He really wants them to be friends, and not just for his sake. Poe’s already there, behind the bleachers, headphones in, when Finn and Rey walk up.

“Isn’t this your thing, though? The two of you? I don’t want to intrude,” Rey hisses as they start down the hill.

“You’re not intruding,” Finn says, hands in the pockets of his jacket--Poe’s jacket--and rolling his eyes a little. He knows what she’s implying, though. She’s heard so much about Poe, and sometimes she gives him these _looks_  when he’s, well, when he’s telling a story about Poe while wearing his jacket. Finn knows that. He does. But he also knows that sometimes Poe shoots him similar looks while he talks about Rey. He thinks that maybe, when they meet each other, as soon as they have a frame of reference for each other beyond what they’ve heard through him, they’ll both get it. They’ll both understand.

“If you say so,” Rey says. Finn grins at her and pulls a hand out of his pockets to tug on her arm again.

Poe pulls one earbud out, watching them with a raised eyebrow as they approach. Finn can hear the faint, already-familiar guitar chords when they get close.

“Hey,” Poe says, an eyebrow still raised.

“Hi!” Finn enthuses. “I thought it was time you two met.”

“Hi,” Rey says, looking Poe over like she is taking in everything she can, like every detail, from his boots to to the rip in his pants across the knee to the fit of his sweater to the way his hair falls, matters. Rey is, in general, searching, calculating, suspiciously taking in all she can about everyone all the time. It’s sort of intense, but Finn actually envies it.

“It’s good to meet you,” Poe says, straightening himself up and holding out a hand to shake Rey’s. She moves her eyes from his face to his hand and then smiles a little, reaching back.

“You too, Finn talks about you a lot,” Rey says. Finn flushes, but nods and shrugs, because it’s true.

“Yeah? Probably not as much as he talks about you,” Poe says, smiling too.

“We should meet up in private and talk about him a lot to make up for it,” Rey say, smirking. Poe laughs like that surprises him, and shakes his head.

“Like a Finn admiration club?” he says after a second, dropping Rey’s hand but grinning broader than before.

“Exactly,” Rey says, lifting an eyebrow at Finn and looking pleased.

“You could just talk about me while I’m here,” Finn says, laughing. Rey shakes her head.

“Absolutely not,” Rey says.

“No way,” Poe agrees.

“That’s no fun at all,” Rey giggles a little. Poe laughs too, and Finn feels this sort of warm thing flipping in his stomach, a deep sort of happy that he’s been realizing lately he’s never really felt before.

“I don’t know if I want you two ganging up on me,” Finn says.

“Shouldn’t have introduced us then,” Rey says, “sorry. These are the rules.”

“Too late now,” Poe says, reaching out and putting a hand on Finn’s arm casually.

“What are you listening to? I hear you’re some sort of punk,” Rey says, drawing out the word punk scathingly but keeping her voice warm and teasing, like she rarely is with people who aren’t Finn. Poe laughs again.

“Some sort,” he says, shaking his head. “Um. The Rebel Alliance, _Death Star_ , specifically.”

“I’m more into grunge, but I can respect that,” Rey says, laughing too.

“Thanks?” Poe says, biting his lip but eyes looking amused. Finn feels like bouncing.

“We could trade music, playlists, sometime if you’re up for it,” Rey offers, and shoots Finn a look as she does, like she wants to know if he thinks she’s doing well. He beams at her.

“We could all listen to things together!” Finn says, cutting in. “I mean. Unless that’s a secret Finn Club thing or something. Since I don’t make the rules.”

“I have most of my favorites on vinyl, if you want, you could both come over,” Poe says.

“Of course you do,” Rey says, rolling her eyes a little but then adding: “I make fun mostly because I’m jealous.”

“I know this great record shop--they have a big grunge selection, we could all go. My friend Muran used to work there, before he went off to college. They have a lot of things you’re into, too, Finn,” Poe says, fidgeting with his abandoned headphone string, and Finn kicks the gravel at the toe of his sneakers, because he's listened to their records and he's heard all about Poe's causes but he still doesn’t feel _into_ these kinds of things, not in the defined way of Poe’s studded wristbands, not in the effortlessly haphazard way of Rey’s loose ponytails and flannel.

“I don’t have a record player,” Rey says, frowning a little. Poe shrugs.

“Use mine,” he says, grinning. Rey brightens.

“Let’s do it,” she says. They’re both grinning at each other and sending Finn these longs looks too, and he feels proud of himself. Like he’s clearly chosen great people, like the way they both like him and now each other is a huge accomplishment. Maybe it is. He thinks--he’s been thinking a lot lately, about choices, about wanting things, about all the things he’s never had, and right now, all he wants is this. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do after graduation, he doesn’t know what is going to happen with so many things, but maybe that’s okay.

Because being with them? He sort of doesn’t care. He feels like they’re already the most real things he’s ever had. He feels like them liking each other makes that even better and more solid. Like if they like each other, then no one can take them from him.

They do make plans to listen to music together, and Rey and Poe put each other in their phones, and Finn feels like he’s floating with how glad he is the whole time.

Later, Rey will tell him that Poe has a good face and that she likes him, and Poe will offer a small but sincere, _yeah, she’s really great_. And Finn will feel on top of the world.

*

It’s a Wednesday, and Rey is sitting on the edge of Poe’s bed, feeling weirdly at ease considering it’s the third time she’s ever spent time with Poe and the first time she’s ever been in his room. She’s telling the boys about the virtues of the Smashing Pumpkins while a record plays, a scratchy echo in Poe’s room. Rey can feel Finn’s eyes on her, and when she catches them it looks like he’s thinking, like maybe he is having an idea of some sort. Rey pushes on with what she was saying, leaning back on Poe’s bed, stretching out her arms as she talks. Poe laughs from beside her, spinning in his desk chair.

“Hey, Rey?” Finn asks when she’s done, like he was waiting for her to finish. She thinks he probably was.

“Yeah?” she says, not bothering to sit up.

“Can I ask you a serious question?” Finn asks. His voice sounds serious, too, heavy.

“I guess,” Rey says. She runs her fingers on Poe’s bedspread, and she thinks it should feel weird to do, that all of this should feel weird, this whole long afternoon and the way she feels comfortable here. She’s always felt comfortable with Finn, right from the start, but she thinks Poe is already one of her favorite people--that they’ll be friends, actual friends, and not just because it will make Finn happy.

“I was just thinking, I know you mentioned you don’t always stay at your foster family’s house,” Finn says. Rey sits up to study him. Poe stills in his chair, eyes darting between them.

“That’s not a question,” Rey says carefully. She knows Finn would never do anything that wasn’t well-intentioned, she trusts that about him, but this is not a thing she thinks she wants to talk about. Ever. These moments are what helps her forget, honestly.

“I know, sorry, I just thought, what if you stayed somewhere else?” Finn says.

“Don’t,” Rey says, because she thinks she’s tried it all over the years, and nothing has ever been better. It’s always just different kinds of bad. She’s almost done anyway, a few more months and no one can make her live anywhere. She’s looking forward to it and dreading it at all once. It’s a few more months before she has to let something go, she thinks, she knows. Something she’s always been holding out for. She’s never wanted to out-age the system, she’s held out the hope of getting reclaimed by faces she barely remembers but whose voices are burned in her head _promising_ it wouldn’t be forever and--

“Here,” Finn says, wincing but pressing on like he thinks it’s important. Rey shakes her head instantly.

“What?” she says, crossing her arms and frowning. Maybe she hasn’t tried everything, because she hasn’t tried pity, hasn’t tried people feeling sorry for her, but she’s not about to start now.

“I just thought--there’s a guest room here, and we’re all friends? And you only have a few months and you said they don’t care where you go! And your dad is great, Poe, and I know you’ve mentioned friends crashing here before, and I just thought, maybe, it was an idea, probably a terrible one, right? It was a terrible idea, shit, it’s not even my house or anything, and your foster family will probably get in trouble or something and so would your dad and it’d all be my fault, and, and,” Finn says, jumping to his feet and pacing a little.

“Don’t,” Rey says again, honestly not sure what else to say. It sounds weak to her own ears, though, a little whisper of protest.

“It was a terrible idea. I just worry, you know I worry, that’s all,” Finn says. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“I’m fine,” Rey says, with this ridiculous sort of tremble in her voice she can’t shake or make stop.

“I’m sorry,” Finn says again.

“I mean, I could ask,” Poe says, cutting into the conversation. They both swirl their heads to look at him.

“What?” Rey asks. She means it to sound harsh, she wants to snap it. She hates, _hates_ that when she asks it sounds _hopeful_. She doesn’t need this, she can take care of herself. She always has.

“I could ask my dad,” Poe says, running a hand through his hair as he does, “I think he’d probably go for it. If you need--if you want,” Poe finishes, shaking his head a little.

“I can handle myself just fine,” Rey says, softly. Finn sits down beside her on Poe’s bed and looks at her and then Poe, who nods again.

“I know,” Finn says resolutely, “if there’s anyone I’ve ever met who can, it’s you, Rey. But that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.” He grabs her hand as he says it, and she thinks she should pull away, but doesn’t.

“You don’t even really know me,” Rey says, turning her eyes to Poe, who shrugs.

“Finn does,” he says, like that’s good enough. The thing about Finn, though, is that it sort of feels like it is. Like it’s more than good enough.

“I’ll never bring it up again if you tell me to drop it, I just wanted to, I don’t know. I thought we could give you another option,” Finn says, incredibly sincere and real and good sounding. “It was a terrible idea, I’m sorry, you guys.” Rey studies him--how wide his eyes are, how serious his forehead looks, how concerned the lines of his mouth seem, how the soft pullover fleece he has on clings to him, how his jeans are just a little bit wrinkled, how his hand in hers is soft and not at all demanding, how she sometimes feels like she can see him thinking and how fascinating that is. She looks over and studies Poe, too, Poe who she doesn’t know as well but likes immensely already, Poe who loves records and music written before he was born, Poe who has kind eyes and a face that is hard to look away from, Poe who stacks bands on his wrists and pins on his bags, Poe who was kind to Finn back on a day he needed it badly.

She thinks maybe she could stand to let someone, both of them, be kind to her.

“You really think your dad would say yes?” Rey says tentatively. Finn squeezes her hand tight and shuts his eyes for a second, and Poe smiles and rolls his chair toward the edge of his bed to be closer to them. “Just for, like, a trial run, a couple of weeks, or somewhere for when--”

“I think it’s worth asking even if he doesn’t,” Poe says. “Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had friends crash here.” Rey looks down, feeling a little overwhelmed, but she grabs for Poe’s hand too, squeezing his fingers in a thanks she can’t quite get out of her mouth yet.

“Sorry for offering your house like that without asking you first,” Finn says, smiling at Poe, and saying it in a way that Rey can tell is both totally sincere and also a way to pull attention off Rey a little. She squeezes his hand too, another silent thanks.

“I don’t mind,” Poe says, grinning at Finn in this way he does, Rey has noticed, this way she thinks is probably more charmed than anything else. It makes her smile too, to see it.

“I’m still sorry, to both of you, if I overstepped there,” Finn says. Rey shakes her head and sees Poe do the same. Finn smiles again and then reaches out his other hand to grab for Poe’s, in a way that feels a little bit like a joke but mostly very serious.

“No need to be sorry, at least on my end,” Poe says, eyes darting to his own hands, one in Rey’s and one in Finn’s. Rey watches his eyes and thinks she knows the feeling. “I’ll talk to my dad.”

“I wanted us all to be connected, like a united front,” Finn says with a wry smile, picking up their hands. Rey laughs.

“Thank you,” she whispers, finally getting it out, feeling like it’s too small as soon as she says it. They both just squeeze her hands back and smile.

*

Rey comes over for lunch to talk it all over with the Damerons before she actually moves in, and she keeps shooting Poe these long, nervous looks like she thinks maybe it’s all going to fall apart. It doesn’t. He squeezes her hand under the table and his dad makes conversation and goes over some basic house rules while assuring Rey over and over that she’s welcome and that he’s glad to have her and to help. It had been fairly easy to get his dad to agree--Poe’s never known his father to not want to help someone in a bad situation, and the guest room hasn’t been used for proper company since about Poe’s freshman year. There’s a slightly awkward bit in the middle of sandwiches being offered about doors being kept open and appropriate times of day to be in each other’s rooms at all, but it’s over mercifully quickly.

Poe walks her to the door after lunch--she’d wanted to go back to her foster home alone one more time to get her stuff--but Poe is picking her up in a few hours, and then Finn is coming over this evening to help her get settled.

“Wish me luck?” Rey says at the door.

“Luck?” Poe echoes.

“I haven’t actually told them yet,” Rey says. Poe sucks in a long breath.

“How is that going to go?” Poe asks, frowning.

“You want an honest answer?” Rey shrugs. “They won’t care, once I tell them they can keep the checks.” Poe winces, a flash of anger flaring up in his chest. “I’m telling them I’m moving in with my boyfriend, they can assume whatever they want about that.”

“You going to be okay? I can go with you now,” Poe says. He’s never met Rey’s foster family, but he knows enough that it all makes his skin crawl a little.

“I’ve got it. Just, maybe, lean on your motorcycle outside the house when you get there to add to the story? And wear your,” Rey stops and looks him up and down, “no, yeah, wear that. That’s good.”

“Glad you approve,” Poe says, grinning. “You want me to have a cigarette against my bike while I wait?”

“If you would,” Rey says, gratefully, and then leans in to give him a quick hug.

“Text me if you think of anything else you need,” Poe says into the hug.

“I’ll see you soon,” Rey says, pulling back and heading out the door, looking a little shaky. Poe pulls out his phone to text Finn a status update, waiting for Finn’s return message before he heads back in the kitchen to help clean up from lunch.

“You know, _mijo_ , you had me a little nervous there for a minute,” his dad says from the sink. Poe pauses.

“I did?” he asks, frowning.

“When you first introduced me to Rey with this idea, for a second there--well, Frank at the station has a daughter two years younger than you, and he’s about to be a grandfather, so. I got a little nervous there,” Poe’s father says, turning to meet his son’s eyes.

“Oh,” Poe says, because that honestly hadn’t occurred to him, “you don’t need to be.”

“I got that much. Sorry if I embarrassed you at lunch--if that’s not something I need to be worried about, either, or even if it is or--I’d make those same rules if it was anyone. Just like I did with Karé and the others,” his dad says, and then stops. “Just like if it was your friend Finn, or.”

“I know,” Poe says, shrugging. He thinks about all the times last year Karé had thrown herself on their couch dramatically, proclaiming she wasn’t leaving all weekend or until her mom let her dye her hair purple, whichever came first. He thinks about how close he’d been with his old friends, how many times they’d spent nights, days on end at each others’ houses, what it means that this is the first time he’s really stopped to think about what these kinds of rules mean.

“You can always come to me,” his dad says, putting a hand on Poe’s shoulder. Very often, he feels like his dad is sort of throwing him these low pitches, suggestions he’s waiting for Poe to jump on, bait he’s waiting for him to take. Poe’s not quite ready to do it yet, but he’s always comforted by the knowledge that his dad will support him, will be great about it when Poe does. When Poe knows for sure what he’ll be saying, what words he’ll use.

Poe’s phone lights up from Finn again, and his dad tilts his head and smiles a little. “I know, thanks,” Poe says, shrugging again but meaning it. He’s pulled into a hug a second later, and he’s grateful for that, too.

Two hours later he stands, leaning on his motorcycle, smoking mostly for effect, and feeling eyes on him from the front window of the house Rey walks out of, three duffle bags on her shoulders.

“Need help?” Poe says as she gets close, putting out the end of his cigarette and and reaching out a hand.

“Yes,” Rey says, leaning in and kissing him on the cheek, not far from the corner of his mouth, quickly. Poe raises an eyebrow and she shakes her head, a tiny motion, face still by his and says, “for effect. They’re watching us leave. So let’s get out of here.”

“You got it,” Poe says, helping her with bags and getting them situated, handing Rey a helmet and heading out, still feeling eyes on them until they leave the block.

“I did it,” Rey breathes at the stoplight, leaning in close to his ear to be heard over the motor.

“You okay?” Poe asks. She still seems a little shaky, but then, who wouldn’t, he thinks.

“Yeah,” she says, and then she leans in even closer and says, “it was for thanks, too.”

The light changes to green then, and it’s too loud to talk the rest of the way back. When they get back Finn is there hugging everyone and insisting on carrying Rey’s bags. Poe thinks about how all this had all been Finn’s idea to start with--because, really, most things start with Finn, are sort of centered on Finn--and he thinks about Rey sitting on the back of his motorcycle telling herself _I did it_ over and over again, as if she’d been trying to convince herself it was real, and he thinks, when his dad hugs them and tells them all there is a lot of gratitude going around today, just how right that feels.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings for: marijuana use, discussion of underage sex and alcohol use, implications of child abuse and issues within the foster system (including passing mention of child sexualization/objectification - not directed at any protagonists, but still, just to be safe), minor implications of racism, passing mentions of AIDS and 1970s period-typical drug use.

Poe’s not really studying anyway when Rey joins him on the back deck, sitting down on the stairs next to him and turning her eyes upward without a word. It’s just getting dark, the sky turning those evening sorts of colors and a calm breeze in the air. Poe had been hoping he’d have less distractions out here, that the air would clear his head and help him focus. It hasn’t helped much at all, and he thinks that maybe it’s just that he’s already absorbed as much of the text as he can. He folds his history textbook and turns to look at Rey.

“Hey,” Rey says, like she feels his eyes on her.

“Hey,” Poe says back. She’s sitting so she’s leaning back on her hands, making an angle from the top of her forehead to the tips of her fingers that his eyes trace without really thinking about it.

“BB-8 was sleeping in the middle of the bed, I didn’t want to disturb,” Rey says, and Poe laughs. In the six days she’s been at the house, Poe has hardly seen his dog at all. BB-8 has been spending hours at all times of the day in the guest room that is Rey’s now. Poe is pretty sure he could be offended about that, but mostly, he thinks it’s sort of great. (Two days ago, he might have walked past Rey and BB-8, cuddled and both sleeping, and he might not have been able to stop himself from taking a picture and sending it to Finn.)

“I’ve been there,” Poe says, grinning. For such a tiny dog, BB-8 can take up an awful lot of space, completely taking over furniture at times.

“Studying?” Rey asks, looking over at him and his discarded book.

“Not really,” Poe says honestly, sighing. Rey nods and then turns her eyes back to the sky, watching a plane ascending in the distance.

“Do they always fly that low here? I keep seeing them,” Rey says, still watching. Poe shrugs.

“We’re not that far from the county airport, so,” he says. Rey turns her head back to him, smiling a little.

“A few years ago, I was in this house--out near Tucson, and we were so close to this little airport that I could hear the planes from inside. It was so loud it would make the house shake sometimes, but there was this place I could sit on the roof and watch them take off,” Rey says.

“Was it louder up there?” Poe says, even though he’s aware as soon as he does that it’s an obvious question. (He wants to ask more, he thinks, wants to know how she ended up in New York of all places from somewhere out in a desert, wants to know all about Rey’s life and the things she’s seen, the places she’s been that have brought her here, brought her to this conversation out on their deck. He thinks he should, sometime, makes a note to do so once she’s more settled in.) Rey grins at him and tilts her head.

“Yeah, I’d take headphones, listen to music while I watched,” Rey says.

“That’s kind of awesome,” Poe says, trying to picture it: a rooftop, and music pounding in his ears, and planes carving low-lying dreams into the desert sky.

“It was,” Rey agrees. “When I was little, I wanted to be a pilot, actually.”

“Me too,” Poe says, smiling brightly, thinking about childhood trips and some airline wing pins he still has, remembering the feeling of watching the world getting smaller and smaller out the other side of a plane window.

“Really?” Rey asks, swiveling to look at him full on, her eyes wide.

“It seemed like the coolest job in the world,” Poe says, nodding. Rey nods too.

“I thought it was very sensible at the time,” she says. “All the other kids wanted to be princesses and knights, but I just wanted to fly. I thought clouds were much better than castles.” She stops and trails off, shaking her head at herself.

‘They are,” Poe says, “definitely.”

“What about now?” Rey asks. She shifts again, close enough for their arms to be bumping a little. Poe doesn’t move away.

“Now?” Poe asks, still thinking about flying, still thinking about leaving the world behind.

“What do you you want to be now?” Rey asks, eyes still wide. Poe feels a little exposed, in a good way, like she’s studying him, like she wants to know just as much about him, too.

“No idea,” Poe says. Rey laughs.

“Me either,” she says. Her laugh is warm, always, a thing that keeps catching Poe off guard. Everything about Rey is surprisingly warm.

“I’ve been thinking about--maybe, a little, about politics, though,” he continues. It’s a huge understatement, and he knows it, but it’s also the first time he’s really voiced that out loud. He feels like he’s testing the waters with it, this burning thought he’s had for a while now but has been keeping to himself.

“Yeah?” Rey asks, with a raised eyebrow, but not at all mocking.

“I think, yeah,” Poe says, running a hand through his hair.

“Like, you want to be the mayor of this whole city or something?” Rey says, clearly teasing him, shoving her shoulder into his like she wants him to elaborate. Poe chuckles.

“I’ve just read so many things, and, well.” He stops and shrugs, because he always feels like he should have a better catalyst, like no one is going to take him seriously, but he pushes on anyway. “Reading up on musicians and the music scene--it leads to reading about protests and causes, and then what some of the artists are doing today, and I read all these things people say about making changes, these things people say from the front lines of, you know, making things better. I read about that, and I read these speeches and what people have been able to accomplish, and I think. I want to be part of that. I want to do that,” he finishes, looking at his boots as he does.

“That’s really cool,” Rey says, says sounding incredibly sincere and, maybe, also a bit impressed. He hopes so, anyway.

“It’s just a thought,” Poe says, “I mean. Or maybe I’ll just be a pilot after all.”

“It’s getting cold,” Rey says abruptly, jumping up and tugging at Poe’s hands so he stands too. “I’m still allowed in your room for another two hours. Play me some speeches and stuff.”

“You want to listen to that?” Poe asks, not bothering to protest and pretend that he doesn’t save audio that way. Rey already knows him too well for that. He has hours of Organa campaign speeches in a file that he might have, once, made into a playlist with the Rebel Alliance's most political songs interspersed.

“Well, I have to make sure I agree with your politics before I throw my support into this idea, don’t I?” she asks with a grin and an eyeroll. Poe grabs his book and smiles back, already glad he told her.

“That’s logical of you,” Poe says, following her into the house. Rey laughs again.

“I know,” Rey says with a smirk, “and maybe we can try to get Finn on speaker, too.” From her room, BB-8 runs out and follows them up the stairs, barking happily.

Poe thinks this is a better use of his night than studying, anyway.

*

The art show is a mistake.

They realize as soon as they get there, huddled close together and fielding glares from old rich people, that it is not _quite_ the event the flyer had described. It been advertised as the opening of a new gallery just off the college campus, and they’d been picturing, well.

A _college_ art show.

As in, a show with people not much older than them and some free food, at least, if a few radical ideas might be too much to ask for in this town. Finn thinks as he looks around, though, that this is about as far from that as you could get. The walls are covered in watercolors that somehow look more monotonous than the forests and fields they depict, and there are salami wheels and deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika on the buffet table, and people in pantsuits and turtlenecks all around them are giving them all long looks.

“What is this?” Rey hisses, nudging his ribs with her elbow. Over her shoulder Finn can see the effort Poe is making not to roll his eyes. The wall they’re standing against is draped in a quilt that looks, well, more scratchy than anything.

“It’s, um,” Finn whispers back but doesn’t finish because he doesn’t even know _how_.

The thing is, it’s cold. It’s absolutely freezing outside, and they’ve been cooped up the past three weekends and had been looking for anything to do. There were no decent movies playing, and anyway, they don’t have enough money between the three of them even to split fries and appetizers somewhere else, and they’re already _here_. They’re already here, and they’d been dropped off by Poe’s dad because all three of them can’t actually fit on Poe’s motorcycle, and they could call him back, but then Finn would probably just. Have to go home. Which is not how he wants to spend a Friday night.

“People are staring at us,” Rey says, sounding agitated.

“Yeah. They are,” Poe bites out, sounding equally annoyed.

Finn sucks in a breath to try to fill up his uneasiness. He’s not sure why they’re being stared at. Or rather--which of several possibilities as to why. If he’s being generous, he thinks it’s because they’re easily the youngest people in the room by about thirty years. If he’s not, he worries it’s because he and Poe bring the total number of non-white people in the room to two. If he hits in the middle, he assumes it might be what they’re wearing. (Or what Rey and Poe are, anyway. Finn still feels out of place sometimes, still feels like they both have all this definition and all he has is freefall, still.) There are people muttering a little with the glares, things Finn definitely does not try to make out.

“We should go,” Finn says.

“Go where?” Rey asks, frowning.

“College library building?” Finn suggests, thinking of a summer course he took last year. “If we sit on the inside, we can talk, and there are vending machines?”

“That works,” Poe says, before smirking and gesturing to the hors d'oeuvres table, “but maybe we should get some takeout for the road first.”

“Yes,” Rey agrees instantly. Finn sort of wants to protest that they should really just go, that it would be rude to take food and run, which, almost on cue, Rey supplies: “it seems rude not to,” rocking on her heels and looking excited.

“They probably think we’re just here for the food anyway,” Poe hisses, smiling at Rey.

“I hate to disappoint people,” Rey says back. Finn sort of loves when they do this, even if it still makes him nervous sometimes. He’s not really sure what the rules even are--he grew up with so many, he’s heard so many things he knows are probably not actual things, so he’s still not quite sure. He’s still unclear sometimes on the subtleties between _standing up for yourself_ and _rude_ , the differences between _rude_ and actually _against a rule_. So far, following Poe and Rey’s lead has worked out for him.

“Those rolls do look good,” Finn says. They both beam at him. They slide up to the table, loading plates and ignoring looks as best they can. No one comes over to talk to them, and it makes Finn feel better, like if any of these people were actually making an effort he would not be taking their food and running, but all things considered it’s just a mild thrill. They all exchange a look when they’re done and then head for the door, bolting through the cold when they get outside, across the lawn and into campus, up toward the library building, hands over food plates so they don’t drop them.

They’re laughing when they reach the stairs and sit, probably too loudly, but there’s no one around and they can’t seem to stop. Finn feels giddy with it all, like they just had an adventure. Maybe they did, in a way.

“That was terrible,” Rey says, once they catch their breath, pulling a brownie off her plate and taking a bite.

“What a bad idea,” Poe agrees, laughing.

“They probably shouldn’t have advertised like they did, or at all, if they only wanted--” Finn stops and shrugs, popping a cheese cube into his mouth as he does.

“Their homeowner’s association?” Poe suggests.

“Country club, maybe,” Finn says, shrugging, and making Rey and Poe laugh again, something that still always makes Finn feel that deep down sort of happy. There had been a tiny part of him that had been--not worried, but a little sure, in some selfish part of his heart, that maybe after Rey moved in with Poe, after all the time they’d have to realize how great the other was, maybe things would change. Maybe they wouldn’t need him around as much. If anything, things have changed in completely the other direction. If anything, he sees them both significantly more often now, spends more time with them. He thinks that most of him had always known, somehow, that it would happen that way, but the idea of people wanting to spend time with him for reasons that don’t have to do with better grades on group projects still seems so new.

“They all just looked so mad that we were there,” Rey says, staring at a cupcake.

“Maybe it was just because they knew we wouldn’t like their art,” Poe says, sarcastically, around a piece of bread.

“They were judging us because they were afraid of us judging them?” Rey asks, lifting an eyebrow. Finn grins and picks through his not-very-good side dishes, poking at a slice of jello salad in an attempt to discern if its filling contains any actual fruit.

“Our fault, really,” Poe says. He smiles again and stretches back on the stairs, and then says, “we should go to New York.”

“We live in New York,” Rey points out, poking at Poe’s shirt with a hand that very much has cupcake frosting on it. Poe swats her away halfheartedly and laughs.

“I meant New York City, Manhattan, and you knew it,” Poe says.

“The three of us?” Finn says. Poe grins.

“Yeah. We could go to real art shows, we could go to concerts, we could go places and no one would even notice what we had on or whatever. We could take the subway when it was cold, we could just, I don’t know, it would be great,” Poe says, sounding wistful. Finn slides closer to him on the stairs so that his shoulder is brushing against Poe’s knee. He thinks Poe is phrasing that like he means more than a weekend, that Poe is picturing _the three of them_ living in Manhattan. Finn’s heart races at the thought.

“We could plan a trip, summer, maybe?” Finn says, as Rey laughs again.

“Maybe!” Poe says, lighting up, then shaking his head and putting his plate of food down. “I’m going to find a bathroom, don’t run through the cold without me.”

“Only because you’re our ride,” Rey says as Poe stands.

“Hallway at the top of this landing, first door on the right,” Finn says. Poe laughs, and Finn watches him go, eyes on the studs around his belt, the boots on his feet.

“He does know that it won’t be 1979 even if we do go to Manhattan, right?” Rey says, laughing fondly and leaning her head on Finn’s shoulder. Finn laughs again.

“He can try,” he says, then he frowns, mostly to himself but feeling that out-of-place twinge from earlier.

“What’s up?” Rey asks, looking at his frown. Finn shakes his head, but Rey is so hard not to tell things.

“Nothing, sometimes just, you know--Poe has his punk thing, and you have your grunge thing, and I feel like I should have a thing, too? But I don’t, not really,” Finn says. Rey frowns and grabs for his hand, both of them having given up entirely on their food.

“I mean,” Rey says, biting her lip and looking serious, “a lot of my _thing_ was mostly, you know, trying to hide for a while? I wasn’t going to try and look my cutest and girliest to walk into foster homes with creeps I didn’t know.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Finn says instantly, wincing, freefalling in an entirely new direction at the weight of that. Rey waves him off with her free hand.

“No, listen,” she says, turning to him, sharp enough to be serious in a different way, he hopes. “It’s not like that, nothing ever--you just hear stuff. In the system. You’ve just got to be safe rather than sorry, you know?” She sighs, and Finn lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, too. “I’m just saying, now I really do like all this stuff, this style, and I guess it happens to fit in with the music I like, but it’s not this whole _thing_. So. Do what you want and what you like, whenever and wherever you find it,” Rey says. Finn honestly does not know what he ever did without her, without either of them.

“That makes sense,” Finn says, nodding.

Rey squeezes his hand again, and neither of them turn around when they hear footsteps, even when Poe says, “I can’t leave you two alone for a minute!” in his best mock offended voice.

“We’re actually running away together,” Finn says, making Poe and Rey laugh again. Poe flops back down, slinging an arm around both their shoulders, and Finn thinks, maybe, this is his thing. These two people, and making them laugh, and running in the cold and huddling together and adventures at awful art galleries--maybe that’s his thing.

Maybe they are.

*

Rey can’t quite get over it, still can’t wrap her mind around how well things are going. It’s not something she’s used to. She doesn’t really know how to get used to it.

The fact that she’s allowed to stay here, in this house, and she can lay on a bed and cuddle with a puppy and do her homework, and it’s always calm and quiet and when she shuts the door it’s not because anyone’s--it’s a lot. It’s been years and a thread of houses she only remembers in pieces since she’s had a consistent, safe place to sleep. To be. To actually _live_.

She’d offered, and then offered again when it was refused, and then offered four more times after that, to pay something toward being here, until Mr. Dameron had stopped her and insisted instead that he’d take any money she gave and set it aside for her to take to college with her in the fall. Rey’s not entirely sure that seems fair, but she’s given up the battle about it. So instead, she’s taken to fixing things around the house--she’s always been good at that, machines and parts and computers and gears---and every time she restores something to working order, she feels a little better. She’s always scanning the house, looking for things to repair, any chance she gets.

Nothing looks broken today, and she knows it’s ridiculous to feel disappointed about that, but she does. It’s been a weird day, with more college talk from her coaches at today’s early morning practice, and the probably irrational feeling that once she does it--actually goes off to college and gets out of the system and the state--it really will be over. She might never know or get those answers. She keeps trying to work on that, because logically she knows it’s for the best, but it’s really hard to _feel_ that sometimes. She thinks that it’s good that she’s found Finn and Poe, not just for all the obvious reasons, but because they both know what it’s like to have _family stuff_ and sometimes that helps, even if it’s totally different. Even if they never really talk about it. There’s still Finn and his mom, though, and how she never really got over his father’s combat death, how that’s been so much of the reason Finn has been both sheltered and pressured his whole life, still Poe and the way that, other than for a single mention once, Rey would have had no idea his mother had died. She still doesn’t know how, or anything about it at all. She’s seen pictures from the before and the after, but that’s it.

(Rey wonders--and she’d never ask--but she does wonder, with how old Poe was in the pictures his mom is still in, and how old he is after she fades out of them, well. She wonders if it has anything to do with this punk rock thing, with Leia Organa and the Rebel Alliance.)

She pulls out her phone and texts Finn, since nothing to fix is appearing the longer she stares at the living room, and when he texts back he’ll be right over, she heads up the stairs to Poe’s room. He’s been home from work for about an hour, and she’d heard him get out of the shower about twenty minutes ago, so she figures he’s probably ready for company. His door is open when she gets up, everpresent faint music playing, and that’s always a sign to walk right in, so Rey does.

Poe’s asleep on his bed, hair wet, on top of his covers in only boxers. BB-8, who must have pushed the door open, is snuggling happily with Poe on the bed. Rey stops in the door, just for a second, trying to decide if she should wake him or turn around, when BB-8 perks up, barks, and runs to Rey’s feet happily. Poe stirs and rubs his hands over his eyes.

“Um, hey,” she starts, “I think BB-8 opened your door? I assumed you’d be awake, and dressed, sorry.” Poe lifts a hand from his face and throws her a lopsided grin that doesn’t hide the slight embarrassment in his eyes.

“Shouldn’t be napping anyway,” Poe says, sitting up. He’s still got water droplets all over him, and Rey tries not to follow them but then gives up a little, since she’s already standing here, and lets her eyes wander, landing eventually on the place where the skin on his ribs is still red around his fresh tattoo: the Resistance Records symbol that had been his birthday present to himself.

“Finn’s coming over,” Rey says.

(There is this low sort of pull in her stomach sometimes: when she’s running with Finn and his shirts cling to him, when Finn gets really excited telling a story, when Finn wears _that_ one sweater with the splash of orange, when they’d watched Poe get his tattoo. When Poe plays them folk songs he’d grown up with on his guitar instead of the punk chords he’s traded them in for, his lips curling around accents on syllables she doesn’t hear when they’re singing along to their favorite vinyl. In this moment right now. Sometimes when they’re all touching. It’s this pulling feeling she’s not sure she’s ever quite had in this way before. She thinks it’s not actually different from how she always feels around either of them, it’s not a _separate_ feeling from the way they’re her favorite people in the world, from how good and safe she feels around them, it’s just. A more physical version.)

“Good,” Poe says. He reaches for the back of his desk chair and pulls on a long-sleeved, striped t-shirt that Rey knows is soft from the times she’s borrowed it, and then grabs for his pants. Rey kneels down to play with BB-8, because the whole staring-at-him-not-really-dressed thing has gone on long enough.

“Sorry again,” Rey says, once she can see that he’s got clothes on properly.

“My fault for falling asleep,” Poe says, easily, although Rey is pretty sure he still looks embarrassed. “I should have a talk with BB-8 about doors.”

“Planning on doing super private things?” Rey asks, standing up and starting over to sit on his desk chair.

“Absolutely. All the time, ones you’re not invited to, even,” Poe says, and Rey laughs. Downstairs, she hears the door open and shut, and BB-8 barks happily at the new arrival while Finn climbs the stairs.

“Are we having a Sunday meeting?” Finn asks when he arrives, flopping himself instantly onto Poe’s bed and then frowning a little at what Rey assumes is the dampness of the covers.

“Sorry about that,” Poe says, eyes on Finn, “I fell asleep after a shower.”

“Let’s do something,” Rey says, looking at both of them, feeling restless again.

“Like what?” Finn asks, sitting up a little to lean closer to Rey.

“I don’t know. I had a weird day and I don’t want to think about it anymore, so we should do something,” Rey says. They both nod, like they get it instantly.

What they end up doing is hanging out in the basement, sort of poking around at playing music--because Finn can play the drums a little, and Rey likes to think she can sing, so sometimes they fuck around with songs, and today seems like a good day for it. It’s a good distraction, even if it doesn’t last long. Even if by after a few songs it’s just Poe playing while Rey and Finn dance, Finn pulling on her hands and poking at her stomach to make her laugh, which is exactly what she needs.

Exactly what she wanted, honestly.

*

The air is getting cold, cold enough that Poe’s fingers are shaking a little on his lighter, but he just scoots closer to the fire and to Rey and Finn and takes a long drag. It’s the first warm weekend since fall, and they’ve been sitting around a makeshift fire in Poe’s backyard since just after dinner. Poe’s guitar is slung over his chair--he’s been playing idly for the past few hours as they’ve talked, chords a background to Rey and Finn’s athletics department gossip that turns to them all humming a familiar chorus that launches a familiar conversation.

Next to him, Rey pulls her on her sweater for warmth before taking the joint from Poe’s fingers. The sweater she has on is--or at least was--actually Poe’s. It had been worn to start with, ripped when he’d bought it, and Rey has dug her thumbs into the sleeves and tugged on the edges enough that it’s even more torn. Poe thinks it looks better that way, or, at least, that it looks better on Rey than it ever did on him. Their fingers brush again as he passes her the lighter, and he can make out the scent of the sweater, the fire and the weed and that body wash she likes. She grins at him, a hint of a giggle behind it, and he smiles back, leaning even closer to the fire as he does.

When Finn takes the joint, it’s with hands that seem nervous, and Poe tries not to stare or watch, because this is Finn’s first time with this, and Poe doesn’t want anything to feel weird. He can’t help but watch, though, not just for the echoes of fire on Finn’s face, not just for the way he’s been watching Finn for months now, but because the clumsy, nervous motions just seem to be getting worse. Finn’s not having much luck, and he’s frowning, and that is not what Poe had wanted at all when he’d suggested they do this on an evening his dad was staying late at the station. Finn had mentioned--Poe had been reading an article about Leia’s stance on legalization initiatives for ballots in the fall, and Finn had been looking over his shoulder, and had mentioned that he might want to try it sometime. Poe hopes now that it isn't too much, that Finn trying things and testing his limits hasn’t turned into Poe overstepping them.

“Wait, hang on,” Poe says, holding his hand out to Finn. (He’s only done it this way once, in a stranger’s basement at a party that was no fun, sitting in a tight circle trying to block it all out, Karé’s hands in his hair, Muran’s laughter right by his mouth and lolo’s voice whispering a joke Poe hadn’t quite caught.) Finn shoots him a confused look but passes back the lighter and the joint, carefully.

“What?” Finn asks, eyebrows raised. Rey tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and looks at Poe curiously as well.

“Come here, I’ll help,” Poe says, leaning so that he’s as close to Finn as he can get without getting up.

“Help?” Finn asks, but he moves, too, until there’s hardly any space between them at all.

“Yeah, I can inhale and then pass it to you,” Poe says, “you just breathe it back from me, okay?” He’s not sure he’s explaining it well, but he thinks it’s probably one of those things that makes more sense in practice. Finn nods anyway and leans again, looking just a little shaky.

“Okay,” Finn says. Poe smiles again, then takes a deep drag and puts his face as close to Finn’s as he can and nods a little. He can feel the slightest sensation, the lightest brush of lips as Finn takes it, breathing in Poe’s air.

“Oh,” Finn says, sitting back a little and shaking his head slowly.

“That was a good idea,” Rey says, a warm sort of edge to her voice and a flush on her face as she looks at them. “I can pass to you too, Finn.”

“Um,” Finn says, “won’t I get twice as much then?”

“Aren’t you behind?” Rey counters, raising an eyebrow and then shooting Poe a look he can’t quite read but he’s sure that he likes.

“Right,” Finn says, biting his lip, with a grin that betrays the suspiciousness he’s trying to convey.

Poe thinks, about a minute later, watching smoke pass between the fraction of an inch between their faces, Rey’s hand on Finn’s shoulder and both their faces flushed, that somehow the sight of that is getting to him even more than the weed is. He thinks he could watch the two of them do just about anything; he thinks, if he’s being honest with himself, he’d like to do nothing else.

The next time, when Finn’s lips actually touch his, Poe notices there’s a small pressure chasing the smoke that might be chasing something else entirely, the night air turning from cold to a sticky heat that clings to his skin, with touches lingering like scents on fabric and a closeness that brings more warmth than any fire.

*

Rey is at one of the yoga sessions she’s been taking lately, the ones her coach recommended that she says help with her concentration on the mat, when Finn shows up at the Damerons. He knows Poe will be around, and he feels like there are a million things on his mind all at once, spinning, and he needs to talk. Poe’s out back, and he just smiles when he sees Finn, like he doesn’t mind at all that Finn had shown up out of the blue.

“Hey,” Poe says.

“Hey,” Finn says, sitting down. The thing is, when he’d turned down his scholarship to take a year off, he hadn’t thought that might mean he’d have to _stay here_. To stay here while Rey and Poe leave, while they’re off at college and it’s just him and his mom and--

“Everything okay?” Poe asks, studying him. Finn shakes his head.

“I was talking to my manager at work,” he starts, and Poe turns to look at him, a look washing over his face that Finn would say is _relief_ , if that made any sense at all.

“Okay?” Poe prompts.

“I was just thinking, about fall, and--I thought, well, I had this idea,” Finn says. He’s been thinking, and looking into it, and. Rey is most likely off to some small town in Pennsylvania that’s mostly a college campus, because she’s being offered a full ride, and Finn is glad for her, but he doesn’t really want to think about that. Poe isn’t headed nearly as far, though. “I was thinking, and there are branches of the store in Oswego, so I was. Sort of, I.” He takes a breath to steel himself for what he wants to say next. “I don’t want to stay here when you two leave. If it would be okay with you, I thought, maybe.” He trails off, because Poe is breaking into a wide smile and nodding.

“That would be so awesome,” Poe says, putting a hand on Finn’s knee.

“Yeah?” Finn asks. On impulse, he puts his hand on top of Poe’s, because the pressure of Poe’s touches is always one of the most comforting things in the world. “I don’t want to just invite myself to college with you, and maybe you have to live in a dorm because those are the rules, so I would just be in the way--”

“Finn,” Poe says, curling his fingers around his knee in a very purposeful way, like he’s putting an end to the debate. “I’d love it.”

“Oh,” Finn says. He leans closer into Poe, so their hips are bumping.

“You can transfer stores?” Poe asks.

“My manager said I could, that maybe I could even be an assistant manager there, and if I have a job my mom would be okay with it, I think,” Finn says. “I just don’t want to stay here, alone.”

“I wouldn’t want you to,” Poe says quietly. He’s biting his lip, and his fingers are moving around Finn’s knee, little traces of touches.

“I thought, if you wanted, we could get an apartment, and there is a bus Rey could take, I looked. She could come visit all the time, if she wanted,” Finn says.

“Well, now I’m almost looking forward to it,” Poe says, bumping his shoulder against Finn’s. It hadn’t been his first choice, Finn knows, a financial decision and not what Poe really wants at all. He knows Poe actually wants things much bigger and brighter. He thinks Poe deserves them, which is why he’s also been staying up at night looking up things other than transit schedules and regional store locations.

“And I was also thinking--if we start saving now. What if all three of us really _did_ go to into Manhattan for a few days this summer?” Finn adds. Poe is giving him this _look_ that he does sometimes, one that makes his insides feel sort of liquid. He’s seen Rey get the same look. He wonders if he has a look for each of them. He thinks he probably does. He moves a hand to put an arm around Poe’s shoulders, pulling him in, and feels like it’s a natural sort of thing, a motion he hardly thinks about.

“We should,” Poe says, not moving his hand from Finn’s knee, fingers still drumming a little. They sit in silence for a minute, a comfortable one that Finn feels warm in.

“So you don’t have to live on campus?” Finn says, after a pause.

“I don’t. I was going to, but I don’t have to,” Poe says, laughing a little.

“Okay,” Finn says, “That’s good.”

“It is,” Poe agrees, “I like this plan a lot.”

“I hoped you would,” Finn admits, which earns him another one of those looks.

“Have you mentioned it at home yet?” Poe asks, saying the last part carefully, almost whispering the word _home_.

“I wanted to talk to you first,” Finn says. He’d thought that if it was okay with Poe--if Poe wanted him around next year, if Poe thought it was a good idea too, well. He’d thought it would be a lot easier to table it with his mom if it had Poe’s support. “I really do think as long as I have a job, it’ll go over pretty well?”

“Good,” Poe says.

“And maybe once I’m there, I’ll feel like I’m ready to do the whole college thing, and then,” Finn stops and shrugs. He doesn’t really have a plan from there, but his grades are still stellar and his extracurriculars are still impressive, and he thinks as long as he can explain himself well, he’ll be okay getting into wherever in a year. He hopes, anyway. Sometimes, he has this crippling fear that he’s ruined his whole life, that this is it, the start of a downward spiral and maybe he should have just let everything happen like it was supposed to happen rather than potentially ruining everything and--

But with Poe’s hand on his knee and the start of an actual plan for next year, it’s hard to not feel like it might be okay after all.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, and I mean, I’ll help, if you want, however you want,” Poe says.

“I know,” Finn says, and he means it. He keeps picturing it all, the little apartment they’ll live in, BB-8 running around it, and Rey being there as much as possible, and a million little things they’ll have to figure out, and maybe, most of all, the three of them on a couch that feels like it’s _theirs_ somehow, happy and content. Like now, but somehow more permanent, more adult, more something they can make just the way they want.

Finn squeezes Poe’s hand and thinks he wants to let himself look forward to it, too.

*

Poe flexes his feet at his ankles on his bed, Finn and Rey on either side of him. It’s early afternoon, that after-school time before dinner that it feels like they always spend together. Even with their jobs (Finn works three days a week from five to nine, Poe works every Sunday from eleven to six and one weekday from six to nine, and Rey’s schedule varies but she never has to be in before five-thirty), this time still feels like theirs.

“They thought cocaine wasn’t addictive?” Rey is saying in disbelief, laughing at the idea.

“Safe and non-habit-forming,” Finn nods, making Rey laugh harder.

“They really just ran around like, ‘let’s do all the drugs and have all the casual sex we want, because coke is absolutely not addictive and no one has heard of AIDS yet’? Really?” Rey says, still giggling. Poe laughs too.

“I mean, I wasn’t there! I don’t really know, but yeah, I think,” Poe says. They’d been talking about Studio 54, because Poe had stumbled across a Luke Skywalker article during study hall that he’d never seen before today.

“Yes you do! You’re a late ‘70s Manhattan encyclopedia,” Finn says, grinning and shifting a little. They don’t really all fit on Poe’s full-sized bed, it’s all bumping limbs and tangles, but that’s part of why they do it, honestly. Poe has no idea what the fuck they’re ever going to _do_ about it, but he doesn’t really lie to himself about the reasons they all like to lay tangled on his bed every afternoon.

“But I wasn’t there,” Poe says again, “that’s just what people say in documentaries.”

“That just doesn’t sound like it adds up,” Rey says.

“Faulty logic,” Finn agrees. They’re both still looking at Poe like maybe he is personally responsible for 1970s drug use. He laughs again.

“We could watch--” Poe starts.

“No,” Rey says, cutting him off and laughing. “I have to get ready for work in forty-five minutes. We’re not spending it watching half of one of your documentaries. _Again_.”

“I could read a book passage to you instead?” Poe suggests, smirking and not at all serious. Rey shoves a pillow in his direction in protest, and Finn buries his head in Poe’s shoulder, laughing silently.

“Don’t you have all those books memorized? Do you even need to read them anymore?” Rey asks.

“Hey, you two are the ones who were all disbelieving,” Poe says, gesturing with his hand and then putting an arm around Rey’s shoulder.

“I don’t know how they did it, I’ve never even been drunk, really,” Finn says, mostly into Poe’s shoulder. Poe startles and Rey rolls on her side, still under Poe’s arm, to stare at Finn. This is the sort of thing Finn still does sometimes--that they both do, in vastly different ways, actually--they say these things that totally throw Poe off balance, because. Poe forgets sometimes, with how well they all fit together, with how he feels like he has more in common with them than anyone else he’s ever known, he forgets how different their lives have been from his. How much Rey has seen. How sheltered Finn was.

“No, we’ve talked about this, you said you had!” Rey protests, staring at Finn. Poe nods in agreement, because she’s right, they have. They had this conversation several times and Poe is _certain_ Finn had said--

“No,” Finn protests, “all I said was that I’d had alcohol! But. I’ve never been drunk. I don’t think, anyway.” He hasn't moved from Poe’s shoulder yet. Poe considers that and nods slowly. He slides a hand up and around Finn, palm on his ribs over his shirt. He always wants--when these things come up, he wants to fix them. He wants to puzzle them out and fix them, make it better. He’s not sure that’s right, because not ever having been drunk is not an actual _problem_ , maybe it’s the opposite of one, but something in Finn’s voice sounds sort of sad, like maybe that choice wasn’t so much a choice as yet another teenage experience missed in a sea of perfect report cards and ROTC meetings, so Poe pulls him in a little closer.

“Did you not want us to know that, before?” Rey asks, shifting herself and putting an elbow on Poe’s chest and putting her chin on her hand so she can study Finn across Poe. Finn gives a small shoulder shrug and turns his head up a little to look at them.

“I’ve always been sort of nervous about that--getting drunk--but that’s weird, so I didn’t want to, I mean,” Finn says, biting his lip.

“It’s not weird,” Rey says instantly.

“Not at all,” Poe agrees. On his record player, _Alderaan_ crackles to a stop. If he wasn't so tangled up in them, he’d get up to flip it.

“Yes, it is,” Finn mumbles, shifting his eyes from them to the ceiling. “And I didn’t want to feel like I was making a list a of things I’d never done, things that other people had--that you both had, that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to but I thought that was pressure, on me, on myself, not from you, of course, but--”

“Oh, god, you’re making me feel like a bad influence now,” Poe says with a grumble, mostly to get Finn to slow down a little, to break him out of the spiral of fast words and worries he’d been in. Rey playfully swats at him and grins.

“He said both of us,” Rey says, following Poe’s lead.

“That’s not what I meant,” Finn says, biting his lip.

“We know,” Rey says. Poe shakes his head again, eyes on both of them, thinking.

“Do you want any of those things now? Do you still have a list? Because, anything you don’t want to do, _don’t fucking do_ , but anything else you ever want to try--you could with us, like we did before? Just the three of us, so it’s safe and no pressure,” Poe says, meeting Rey’s eyes as he does. She nods.

“I’d help you write an actual list if you wanted one,” Rey says, and Finn laughs, looking at both of them again.

“I don’t think I need an actual list,” Finn says, then he smirks and says, “anything, huh?” and does this ridiculous thing with his eyebrows that is much cuter than it has any right to be. He laughs, and Rey holds a straight face, but Poe can feel her shaking a little against him, a laugh she’s holding in.

“Anything,” Rey nods solemnly, clearly going for as serious as possible. She leans all the way across Poe, into Finn and he smirks and leans too, and Poe rolls his eyes even though this isn’t really a joke. He thinks they all know it.

“That’s very helpful of you,” Finn says, doing a much worse job at keeping a serious face than Rey is but giving it his best, dragging a hand on Poe’s chest as he moves his face within inches of Rey’s.

“We try our best, right, Poe?” Rey says, biting her lip, a delighted gleam in her eye.

“We do,” Poe says. He thinks the slightly ragged note in his voice could probably be explained by the fact that they’re both mostly on top of him, making it hard to breathe. That it’s due to the weight of two people on top of him.

Probably.

“Well,” Finn says, and then he twists one hand into the fabric of Poe’s shirt and puts his other hand on Rey’s face before saying, “you’re both too late for that to be on my list. I have already had sex,” and then laughing and falling back. Which is when they all fall back a little, dissolving into a mess of playful shoves that go on for several minutes until they fade, or try to.

“Really? _All_ the kinds of sex?” Rey asks, giggling.

“Oh my god,” Poe groans, and they all lose it again, laughing until Poe’s sides hurt, until they’re still tangled in each other but in a much lazier way. Rey and Finn are both flushed, Rey’s hair falling in her face and her eyes bright, and Finn’s face crinkled in that happy way, his clothes disheveled from all the shoving.

“I would like to see what it’s like to get drunk before I graduate, though, just with the two of you,” Finn says, after they’ve stopped laughing.

“We can do that,” Rey says.

“It’s a plan,” Poe says, and Finn smiles again, that happy smile that makes Poe feel like maybe he did fix something after all. Maybe he and Rey fixed something. Or started to, anyway. “We’ll set a time and I’ll get us something?”

“I like it,” Rey says, and then groans as the alarm on her phone goes off, reminding her that it’s almost to time to get ready for work.

“That’s right, you have a fake ID,” Finn says, looking at Poe like he thinks that’s an amazing thing. Poe shrugs.

“You never know when it’ll come in handy,” Poe says.

“Right. Because you’re both a bad influence and a badass. Like the time you used it to get into those not-rated movies at the arthouse because the director giving the talk knew Leia Organa?” Rey says, teasing, putting the sort of mocking weight on _Leia Organa_ that is normally reserved for teen magazine idols. “That was definitely badass.” Poe rolls his eyes, because he is not that bad. Really. He’s not.

“He knew Han better,” Poe mutters, but he’s grinning, pleased that Rey had brought it up.

“Well, then,” Finn says, “guess it really does come in handy.”

“Guess we’ll find out,” Rey says. She laughs again, and then gets up, grumbling about getting ready for work. Poe shakes his head, mostly to clear it, and sits up too. He’s got a paper to write, and Finn’s probably headed out to go for a run any minute. The bubble on their afternoon time is floating away a little. But it never seems to pop.

Sometimes Poe thinks maybe it never will.

*

It’s Finn’s idea to use Rey’s accepted-student VIP day as a way to test the distance between where they’ll all be in the fall. Rey wasn’t even going to go--it hadn’t felt like her thing--but Finn had picked up the glossy flyer stuck in with her acceptance packet and read its bold font invitation out loud to _bring your friends!_ in that excited Finn voice. It does make sense, to use it to see just how feasible the back and forth weekend trips will be. They’ll make it work anyway, but the three-hour difference could turn into a lot longer on a bus, even if every schedule they can pull seems to think otherwise. Mr. Dameron agrees pretty easily to allow them to use his car for the first part of the trip--he says he thinks Finn is actually a better driver than he is--and they find an online discount code for the bus tickets.

They have to leave at 4:30 in morning to make it work, to make sure they make it in time. Finn sleeps over the night before, and they head off in the Damerons’ car, loaded up with caffeine and chips. Finn and Poe keep telling her she can fall back asleep if she wants, since she actually has to talk to people later and all, but she feels like that’s awfully rude to Finn who is doing all this early morning driving for her. So she gulps her overly-sweet energy drink and tells them to keep her awake, instead. It’s not a long drive up to Oswego, and they find parking easily. It’s strange, because, walking to a bus station with Poe and Finn, it finally feels real, the whole college thing. It’s not a feeling Rey is sure of yet--she’s still not sure about Pennsylvania, not sure she’ll be good at campus life, not sure about a lot, even though she knows this is her chance. She knows this is how she gets out, out of the shadow of the system, out of the stories she’s heard from temporary foster siblings. It’s how she makes herself better, makes her life better.

She’s glad, she thinks as they board, the three of them blocking out a set of four seats on a mostly empty bus, that Finn is going to be with Poe next year, that’ll they’ll be together. She’d been thinking about that, about Finn alone and worrying, because Finn is the most capable person she’s ever met, but he’s been going through so much, and she knows how much having people to talk to, having the three of them, has been helping. She knows it helps Finn to say his thoughts out loud, to have someone not just listen but respond in a way that is harder to do over the phone. So she’d been worrying, too, and she’d been trying to figure out how they could all see each other in three places. It’s much easier this way, and it’s better for all of them, even if she’ll be stuck in a dorm room with some stranger she’s going to have to try to like. It’s good, for all of them to have a change--for Finn to not be alone while they move on, and honestly, she thinks it will be good for Poe too. She thinks he’s gotten used to having someone around, that it’s better for him too, a few less hours spent watching grainy footage, a few less hours updating his blog with thoughts on the merits of the Runaways or objections to school policy announcements, less hours lost in escapism about 1979 and more time in the moment and the real world and his actual life.

The seats they’re in are facing each other, so it’s like they have their own little compartment. Rey stretches out as best she can.

“Well, so far, so good,” she says.

“The bus is leaving on time, which is good,” Finn says. He’d been worried about that, about making Rey miss registration for the day because of the bus and then it being his his fault because it was his idea, and Rey had assured him she cared a lot more about them figuring out their logistics than registering on time.

“I should make you two do this sometimes next year too, even if I can’t fit you both in a dorm room,” Rey says.

“You could try,” Poe says, still kind of bleary eyed, not really looking up from his phone where he’s texting his dad that the bus has left.

“We could be sneaky about it,” Finn offers.

“Somehow, I think my roommate will probably notice,” Rey says, “and it would be pretty cramped.”

“We’ll come see your matches, though, if you want,” Finn says. Rey wrinkles her forehead, considering. There is part of her that thinks, well, if she is actually going to make an effort at campus life and new people, then maybe she should--

“Maybe,” she says instead, because she honestly doesn’t want to do any of it without them, not really. She’s not sure she cares if that makes it harder to make other friends.

“Music?” Poe says, looking up and digging the three-way headphone splitters, the ones that had been a birthday present from his dad, out of his pocket.

“I want to pick,” Rey says, grabbing for Poe’s phone.

“Hey,” he says mildly.

“It’s my trip,” Rey says, and Finn laughs. She slides her fingers through the music on Poe’s phone, thoughtful. She’s debating going back to sleep now that they’re on the bus, so she’s looking for something softer, and she’s interrupted when a push notification pops up on his phone and catches her eye. Normally she wouldn’t even look, especially when it’s something personal like email, because even they have limits and boundaries--mostly, anyway--but. This one. This one says, _From: Organa for Senate_ , and Rey pauses.

“So, apparently, the Organa campaign has received your application,” she says, handing Poe his phone back. He blushes, and Finn’s eyes turn to stare at him the way Rey knows she is too. Poe shrugs, even as he’s staring intently at his phone again, eyes clearly scanning the message.

“It’s nothing, I just, I thought it couldn’t hurt,” Poe says, entirely too casually.

“What are you applying for?” Rey asks.

“It’s just, an internship. There’s a stipend and housing and--” Poe stops and looks back both of them. “I’m never going to get it. I barely meet the minimum requirements, I just. I wanted to try, I guess.”

“Of course you should try,” Finn says, instantly. He’s sort of beaming at Poe, like even though it would totally change all of their plans, he thinks the whole idea of it is wonderful. Rey agrees.

“When do you find out?” Rey asks.

“May. But I’ll probably never hear anything, There’s no chance I will, really, so it’s not. It’s no big deal,” Poe says, waving his hands in a way that he probably thinks is dismissive but that comes across flustered. “Sorry I didn’t mention, I just--”

“Shut up, I’m proud of you,” Rey says, kicking him with her foot.

“That’s so awesome,” Finn says, putting a hand on Poe’s shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” Poe says.

“It’s huge,” Finn protests, and Rey nods.

“It’s not,” Poe says, “can we talk about Rey’s stuff again now? Weren’t you picking music?”

“I was,” Rey agrees, grabbing his phone back and shooting a look at Finn, who nods. They let it go, and Rey settles on a music choice and they spend the next several minutes trying to get comfortable. They end up mostly on top of each other, even in the seats, moving up armrests and leaning on one another, all the caffeine not stopping Rey’s eyes from getting heavy once the music is on and her head is on Finn’s shoulder.

She thinks, as the highway rushes by, that she’s sort of overwhelmingly proud of both of them at the moment: Finn and all his choices lately, how from the moment he turned down that scholarship he’s been making choices that are for himself, that will make him happy, and Poe for actually doing something concrete and real about all his ideals and ideas, for looking toward the future that way. She thinks she’s proud that they’re _hers_ , her friends, her people, her. Whatever it is they all are to each other, that is probably not quite, not exactly, friendship at all. At least, not how most people would define it.

So on a campus by a river in Pennsylvania she takes their arms, walks around all day with her arms linked in theirs, and when they smile at her, when they stick by her side through meals and activities and meetings with advisors, ignoring all looks they get--she thinks that they’re proud of her, too. She thinks they’re helping each other grow up.

She thinks she wouldn’t want it any other way.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings for: underage alcohol use, mentions of biphobia, standard mentions of child abuse/neglect as is par for the course here.

When they finally get around to getting drunk together, it tastes better than any other time Finn has had alcohol.

Poe is mixing the vodka with some kind of thick mango juice, promising it will help it go down a bit smoother as he squeezes the concoction out of the paper carton. He’s definitely right: there’s still an afterburn, a feeling in Finn’s throat he’s not a thousand percent sure he likes, at least not yet, but that’s much better than the half dozen or so other times he’s had things out of punch bowls that he’s had trouble swallowing, the times he’s tried to sip down beer so warm it made him queasy just from the smell. (Finn doesn’t miss those parties, the ones where he felt lonely and out of place no matter how many people stopped to congratulate him on a race or otherwise make small talk with him.)

“How will I know when I’m drunk?” Finn asks, making Rey and Poe both laugh. He knows it’s a ridiculous question--he’s seen people be very drunk, he’s heard all about it, but he has to ask, anyway.

“It should be hard to miss,” Rey says, fondly. They’re all lounging on the floor of Poe’s basement, some pillows spread around and music playing from Poe’s phone speaker. It’s always a little chilly down here, more so at night, and Rey and Finn are both wrapped in sweatshirts that actually belong to Poe and they’re all huddled close, knees and feet and hips knocking as they shift around. (They do that last part even when it’s not cold, Finn thinks. Lately, anyway, more and more.)

“We’ll let you know, when you start to seem like it,” Poe says.

“But won’t you be drunk, too?” Finn asks, trying to figure that out and adding, “do I seem drunk yet?” He’s in the middle of his second glass and, honestly, he’s not sure.

“Maybe a little,” Rey says, nodding.

“What do we do?” Finn asks, suddenly feeling like this a very important point. He bites the inside of his cheek, using the hand that’s not holding his drink to tug on his hood strings before taking several more sips.

“What do you mean?” Rey asks, taking a long gulp of her own drink.

“Well. Do we just sit here and drink? Don’t we need to do, I don’t know, _do_ something?” Finn asks. His cup is almost empty, he thinks.

“What else do we ever do?” Poe says, shrugging. “More?”

“Yeah,” Finn says, holding out his cup. “But. Shouldn’t we. I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we what?” Rey prompts. She’s passing her glass to Poe too, and he’s filling everyone up a little more. Finn is fairly sure Poe and Rey are ahead of him.

“I can’t think of anything.” Finn laughs at himself and pulls on his strings again. He likes wearing Poe’s stuff, he thinks. He likes that it always feels like something to ground himself in, like the jacket had, like Poe, like. “I like your--this--hoodie,” he says.

“Keep it,” Poe says, “I can always steal it back if I want.” Finn frowns, because that’s not what he’d meant, even if he likes the sound of it.

“Isn’t that just sharing?’ Finn questions, but that’s not what he meant, either.

“I’ll fight you both for it!” Rey says, laughing again. “I like that one too.” Finn takes a long gulp, and thinks he’s maybe, sort of--not quite _dizzy_ , but. Something close to it.

“I like wearing things that are yours, like your jacket, I. I like,” Finn stops, because that is what he meant, although not all of him is sure if he’d meant to say it out loud. (He thinks it seems quiet for a beat after that. He thinks he’s starting to feel warm.)

“I have an idea,” Rey announces, downing her drink and putting it on the floor, like she’s making a point. “Finn, you wanted to do something special, since we’re drinking, right?”

“Yeah,” Finn says, nodding, glad they’re talking about that again. Rey claps her hands, and her eyes scan the room, landing on an old vase he assumes she probably knew was there.

“So, since this is Finn’s first time getting drunk, let’s pretend that we’re at a terrible party--only there is no one here we hate, so it’s not so terrible after all--and someone suggests a game,” Rey says, putting the vase in between them all, on its side on the ground. She squints at it, then nods and says, “this will work.”

“There are three of us,” Poe says. Finn nods, because he’s pretty sure that’s a good point, even if he’s not certain Rey is implying what he guesses she is.

“Seems like enough to me,” Rey says, flashing them both a smile and rolling the bottle in experimental spins on the floor. Which. _Oh_. That is what Finn thought she meant. He thinks.

“Will that work?” Finn asks, not at all because he objects, but. He thinks this game is like, well, if they’re doing this and playing this, it’s a--not a _ruse_ and not quite a _ploy_ nor a _charade_ but a--his brain skids to a halt when Rey decides to demonstrate by spinning the vase herself, the narrow end landing to point right at Poe, who laughs but nods quickly and then. Oh.

And then Finn must actually be drunk, he imagines, because he sees them kissing, sees _Poe and Rey kissing_ , and he feels like he’s lost a breath at the sight of it, in the best way possible. He feels. Oh. It’s just a quick kiss, a little thing that lingers but then is over, and they’re both smiling afterwards and meeting each other’s eyes, and all Finn wants right now is for them to do it again. He wants them to kiss again. He wants to see. They’re both so. He feels a synapse in the back of his brain that has never fired before in his whole life flare in rapidfire at him. He feels very, very warm now, like those firing synapses are warming the blood in his veins. He finishes his drink. He manages not to say out loud, somehow, that he thinks they should do it again.

“Your turn,” Rey says, kissing Poe’s cheek again as she does. Poe raises an eyebrow, finishes his own drink, and then spins.

It surprises Finn when it lands square on him.

He thinks, it shouldn’t have. He thinks, _of course_. He thinks about words again, swimming for the right one, but never quite reaching it.

“Finn?” Poe says, tentative, and Finn nods, because surprised or not, he’s certain he’d like to kiss Poe, certain that, oh, that sounds very nice right now.

It’s more than nice, when it happens. It makes the blood that had been warm in his veins feel like it’s boiling, and he wants to reach out and pull for more, to try and make it last, to sink into the kiss, to hold on to the feeling of Poe’s mouth on his, the warmth of his body. When Poe pulls back, he’s all eyelashes and devastatingly gorgeous and Finn, _fuck_. Finn swallows to try and keep in his words, but fails.

“Good idea,” he breathes, making them both laugh again, feeling Poe still so close, _so close_ when he presses the vase into Finn’s hand. Finn nods and spins, and this time he’s not at all surprised when--

“This vase is very fair, I like that,” Rey smirks when it points to her, beaming at him. She leans in toward him and she’s smiling, and he hasn’t been counting those in months, but he still thinks every one of them is beautiful. That _she_ is.

Rey kisses like she does most things, really: intense, even in this far-too-quick gesture, _intense_ and warm and sort of aching, soft and sharp all at once, making his skin feel like it’s dancing. He wants to keep her close, keep them both close, wants to do it all again and again, maybe.

He thinks, swimming still, that they’re the best people all in the world, and they’re both so stunning to look at, and they’re his _favorites_ and he wants to kiss them and watch them kiss each other and--

“I’m pretty sure that’s you, both of you, actually, the stunning part,” Poe mutters, and, shit, maybe Finn said some of that out loud? He doesn’t know, he thinks, he hopes.

“I agree with both of you, but about each other, mostly,” Rey says, and then she giggles in a tone of voice that’s not quite her normal way of speaking and says, “you know, I think it’s my turn again now.”

“Greedy,” Poe chides, laughing. Rey laughs and spins again, anyway.

And maybe, this round, it’s a little longer. Maybe it’s something that Finn thinks borders a little closer to _making out_ , even if they do it in turns and laugh afterwards. Even if that doesn’t lead to anything more than a pile on Poe’s floor, cuddled up and warm.

In the morning, all lying underneath a blanket someone must have pulled off the couch for them in the middle of the night, Finn will think it’s highly unlikely a vase would spin to them all in turn like that, and he’ll think that he’s still not quite sure what the word he was after was. He thinks that maybe the little bit of vodka, the calling it all a game, the spinning of the vase, maybe those were all necessary somehow. He’ll think when they all laugh and gulp Gatorade and everything is exactly like it always is in the morning, that maybe it was like some sort of _safeguard_ , a way to cross off another teenage adventure off his list so they can put it behind them.

Even if it was--even if it’s all crossed off and done now--he’s still glad for the experience, he thinks.

*

Poe doesn’t think anything of it when Finn texts to meet him outside by the bleachers at lunch. The three of them have lunch out there more often than not, and they’d already all met up for gross cafeteria coffee together before first period, so he doesn’t really have reason to think something is up.

He _certainly_ does not have reason to think that Finn will rush up looking wide-eyed and a bit frantic and that it will be all Poe’s fault, sort of.

He does not actually lie to himself that people who are not his friends and family ever read his blog. He’s more self aware than that, he honestly is--he writes it with the awareness that its audience is people who have already heard him say these exact things five times before he hits publish. It’s mostly just that he thinks documenting them is a good idea, that writing things down sometimes makes them clearer in his head, or that it might help him remember and refine ideas that could be useful for college things come fall. It’s not meant to be something that actually gets _noticed_. So when he’d written that post last week outlining all the reasons why the rules and policies for prom were bullshit, he hadn’t thought anything of it. He doesn’t, not until Finn rushes up to the bleachers, Rey at his side, frantic, too.

“You’re in trouble,” Finn gasps, out of breath. “You’re in trouble, and I think--I think I just made it worse.”

“What?” Poe asks, frowning.

“Something about prom?” Rey supplies, looking as lost as Poe feels. “He wouldn’t say until we got here.”

“You’re getting called into the office tomorrow,” Finn says, grabbing the metal pole of the bleachers with one hand to steady himself, grabbing for Rey’s with the other. “They want you to take down that blog post, and then you’ll probably get detention, but I--” He cuts himself off and shakes his head.

“Oh,” Poe says slowly. “Shit.”

“But I was there, in the office, running forms and detention slips after fourth period, and I saw your writeup? I was trying to think of a way to get around it, you shouldn’t _have_ to get around it, because you didn’t even break a rule!” Rey moves her hand to Finn’s back, running comforting circles, and Finn takes a deep breath. “So, I. I might have said that. I went into the vice principal’s office--went right in with your slip, I couldn’t stop shaking but I did it anyway, I. Asked him to tell me what rule you had actually broken.”

“You said that?” Rey asks. Her eyes are wide now, and the way she’s looking at Finn is, well. If that’s what Rey’s face looks like right now, Poe does not want to think about his own. Finn’s _right_ \--there’s nothing in the school rules, not technically, anyway, about vocalizing your displeasure about those rules, so long as you’re not talking back to a teacher while you’re doing it--but that’s not the point.

“I did,” Finn says, then grimaces. “I did, and I got glared at and asked to repeat the question, and then I got told that I was ‘personally invested’ in the matter and that it was ‘highly inappropriate’ to read other students’ paperwork that way, and then I got asked not to attend peer discipline this week.” His eyes flash a little on _personally invested_ in a way that makes Poe swallow hard.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” Poe says, putting a hand on Finn’s arm--mostly for himself, if he’s being honest about it, because even though he’s still sort of shaking, Finn is handling this so much better than he would’ve a few months ago. Finn smiles at the touch.

“I did, though,” Finn says. “I felt like I did, because it’s not against the rules, and because I agree with what you said in your blog post, and because I, well.” Finn shrugs a little.

Rey’s face is intense as she throws herself at Finn in a giant hug. Poe thinks the action seems fitting, so he does the same, holding onto both of them for a long minute. He’s sort of at a loss--not for himself, because he’s gotten detention for a dozen similar things in the past four years, and one more, this close to graduation, wouldn’t have hurt anything with college things, wouldn’t have bothered him. (He’s more impressed the school even found his blog, actually, almost more flattered they care enough to be mad at him for it. Almost.) But for Finn? This is a huge deal. For Finn, who still has nervous energy radiating off of him, for Finn whose student office aide work and position on the peer discipline board is one of the last things still tethering him to his life before, for Finn who’s spent so much of his life not allowed to ask questions--for Finn? This is very much a _moment_ , and Poe’s a little overwhelmed that he gets to be here for it.

“So… now what?” Rey says, sounding like she can feel that energy still coursing through Finn, too.

“Well--I was thinking, actually,” Finn starts, “it is also, in fact, not against the rulebook to hand out fliers or pass out information to your fellow students, so long as it isn’t for non-club-related profit and doesn’t contain any profanity or hate speech.” He grins at that last bit, like he knows that quoting the school handbook is not a skill most people have, and Poe grins too. “So I thought--what if, before they make you take it down tomorrow, we printed it.”

“Printed it?” Rey repeats. Poe sits down on the bleachers, and Rey follows suit and sits beside him, Finn talking animatedly in front of them.

“Yeah,” Finn says, nodding and pacing a little, “printed it up, and we handed out copies, with an addendum from the rulebook tacked on to the bottom, just so everyone knows what the rules are on student free speech. Printed it up, and stood right there next to everyone advertising for their club bake sales, handing it out to everyone who will take one.”

“I really am a terrible influence,” Poe says, trying to sound light, but he knows it’s probably something closer to flustered in the best possible way. “That’s actually the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Finn says, looking a little worried as he comes to sit beside Rey. “I didn’t mean to say that all three of us had to do it, I was just thinking out loud--”

“Of course I’m in,” Rey says, putting a hand over Finn’s mouth, laughing softly as his eyes go wide as she does.

“We don’t all have to go down for my shit,” Poe offers, and Rey laughs at that too, and puts her other hand on Poe’s mouth. Poe might have, in some place in the back of his mind, been hoping that would happen.

“You, Poe Dameron, are not allowed to pretend for a single second that you don’t know we’re in every single thing together,” Rey says. She moves her hands away and puts them on her hips instead, pretending to scowl at both of them.

“So,” Finn says, “fliers?” He’s bouncing on the bleachers now, and Poe keeps thinking of that first day in October.

“Do you think we could get anyone to sign a petition?” Poe asks, thinking on his feet. “Something to say that students should get a say in deciding this sort of thing?”

“That’s not against the rules either,” Finn says, beaming at him.

“I love it,” Rey says, clapping her hands.

They stay up most of the night, Rey leaning over Poe’s shoulder on the couch in the Damerons’ den while Poe types furiously at a document Finn’s invited to group video chat on, Poe’s dad popping into the den every now and then with sodas and halfhearted attempts at reminding them how far past lights out it’s gotten. They stay up most of the night and Poe drafts a petition that Finn offers his feedback on, rewriting sentences to best align with the rulebook on his bed in front of him, and Rey designs fliers that she suggests at one point, with a laugh, ought to be printed up using the school’s office printer. (Finn agrees it would be karmically fitting, but probably not worth the hassle.) They stay up most of the night on video chat and get to school bright and early the next morning, and Poe thinks, as they all squeeze each other’s hands, that this feels like practice for the rest of his life. That prom is not the biggest issue in the world, but that on principle, it’s important. He thinks that he never would have done it if Finn hadn’t stood up for him, and he thinks that this a moment that feels like how the rest of his life could go. He thinks that Finn and Rey feel it, too, the three of them taking on the future in the wet grass on a late spring morning. With fliers in hand, it feels like the most real thing that’s happened to him yet.

In the end, twenty-five people sign their petition and they give out about sixty fliers before they’re stopped, which is a lot better than Poe had anticipated. They’re brought into the vice principal’s office and informed that since they clearly don’t respect the tradition of prom, the decision has been made that they’re banned from attending it, words said like they’re clearly a severe punishment. Rey looks she’s about to laugh, and Finn looks ready to say something back, but neither of them do anything more than nod solemnly along with Poe. There are things said about how the school would really prefer it if Poe did not use their name on his blog going forward, and Finn is asked to sit out of peer discipline for another week--

\--And then, that’s it.

Then it’s over.

It’s over, and they’re outside, and Rey is laughing now and saying, “it’s not like we were going to go to their stupid prom anyway,” and even though they’re supposed to be in trouble, it all feels like a victory, somehow.

“Then let’s make our own,” Poe says, because victories require celebration. He thinks an anti-prom of sorts, a night of their own, is exactly the kind this calls for.

And when he’s rewarded for that suggestion with Finn slinging an arm around his shoulder and Rey kissing him on the cheek, that feels like some small victory, too.

*

Rey’s pretty sure what they end up with doesn’t count as any sort of proper anti-prom, even if Poe has super carefully curated a playlist for them for the night and even if they’ve moved the furniture in the basement to make more open space. Finn’s written their names and their graduating year on dollar store cups in ridiculous silver marker, and Mr. Dameron is not only allowing everything but has even given them some money towards it, saying it’s much cheaper than what he’d have shelled out for actual prom, even though Rey is pretty sure he’s well aware they’re just going to spend it on vodka, juice, and multiple types of microwave appetizers and chips sat out on a folding table. Still, there’s something fun about pretending it’s an actual event, she thinks, about treating it like it matters.

So Rey is wearing a dress.

Well, okay. Not _really_. She’s wearing a shirt she’d stolen out of the back of Poe’s closet that he never wears because it’s way too big on him, and she’s thrown a belt around it and put her favorite boots on with it over a pair of leggings, but she figures it’s close enough. It’s more like a dress than anything she’s had on since she was about twelve, and it’s just the three of them, so it more than counts, she thinks.

She thinks part of the reason they’re making it a big deal, even though if things had gone down differently they probably would have just ignored the whole existence of prom, is that it’s sort of nice, sort of symbolic. It feels like everything they do now is important and significant and, maybe, a little part of growing up. This prom thing feels like the first in a series of things they plan to do in the next couple of months, like they have to do this first before they graduate and before they get the tattoos they’re planning on getting together, before they take that trip to Manhattan, before they go off to college. So she takes her time getting ready, lining her eyes, sliding her favorite bracelets on her wrists and tying a corded necklace around her neck, smiling a little into the mirror.

When Rey was thirteen she’d watched a foster sister go to her prom. The girl had been the biological daughter of the family, the oldest of all the kids there, of Rey and the two others. Rey had watched her put on a satiny dress covered in sparkles, watched her put her hair up in elaborate twists, apply lipstick and put on heels Rey couldn’t imagine walking in and spritz herself in perfume, and then watched a boy in a truck pick her up, his hands shaking as he put flowers on her wrists, his tux a compliment to her dress and his eyes wide and words adoring, telling her she looked beautiful. Rey had watched her giggle and blush, like it all made her _feel_ beautiful too.

Rey doesn’t really think about how she looks day-to-day--she hasn’t really ever liked people’s eyes on her and doesn’t really know what it would feel like to be happy because of, at least in part, how you looked.

But.

But she walks down the Dameron’s basement staircase, already feeling light and happy, and Poe and Finn turn their heads to her. There are no flowers or tuxes--Poe’s got a bright button-down untucked under a soft dark sweater, and Finn’s wearing a vest open over a patterned long-sleeve shirt--but their eyes do get a little wide when they smile at her, and it makes Rey’s heart skip around her chest like a drum that can’t find the beat, and she thinks feeling beautiful must feel like this. She thinks she likes how they’re looking at her very much, that she’d like them to keep doing it. (She thinks it’s far from the first time--that, maybe, they look at her like this all the time and she’s never really thought about it.) She thinks it’s some sort of teen cliche moment, only with the vinyl played in reverse, because this is so much better than flowers and tuxes and heels could ever be.

“Hi,” she says, practically jumping down the last few steps.

“Stop looking better in my clothes than I do,” Poe says, then turns to Finn and adds, “both of you, actually.”

“Get over it,” Rey says. She pulls them both into a hug, because it feels like a group hug sort of moment, prom night and all that. Finn laughs, right at her neck, as they both easily fold into her and the hug.

“Should we tell him it’s not true?” Finn asks, in an exaggerated stage whisper.

“It is true, though,” Rey whispers back, “Poe looks like shit in all his stuff. He should just let us have all of it.”

“I already have!” Poe says. “You’ve got half of my closet by now, between the two of you.” Rey laughs and spins out of the hug, heading for their makeshift refreshments table and running her fingers over her cup.

“Stop complaining about it and make me a drink,” she says.

She thinks, as Poe does just that, still muttering under his breath, and as Finn follows and puts an arm around her shoulder again, that they’re all feeling it, the _this is important somehow_ thing underneath the happiness. She thinks it’s also, holding her drink and making their way to their makeshift dance floor, because of that buzz and the heaviness in the air because--

Well. Because last time they’d been drunk, they’d all ended up making out--an idea Rey had been very glad she’d had, even once she was sober--and the few times they’ve gotten high have consisted of more shotgunning than not, and she can’t help but think that dancing like this is a lot like being tangled and cuddled on Poe’s bed in a lot of ways, and how maybe part of this isn’t, well. If part of the whole idea, the whole reason they’re drinking alone in a basement after being banned from something they never wanted to do in the first place isn’t. An excuse, as much as it is a protest.

“This is so much better than real prom,” Rey says, dancing a little, in a way that’s mostly swaying between and around them.

“I actually went to prom last year,” Finn offers.

“How was it?” Rey asks.

“Terrible,” Finn rolls his eyes and groans. “I didn’t even know it at the time, I told myself it was fun, that I was having fun, but--”

“You weren’t really having fun?” Rey asks. She thinks about that a lot--how much Finn talks about all the time he spent doing things he didn’t actually want to, things he was just supposed to. He seems so much happier now, she thinks.

“I mean, I didn’t really have actual friends, not like you guys, and it’s hard to have fun with people who aren’t really your friends, who don’t really like you or know you,” Finn says, shrugging. Rey can’t imagine what that would have been like--the weird sort of popular but isolated Finn was--but she can understand being lonely.

“That makes sense,” Rey says, reaching out to squeeze Finn’s hand.

“Having fun with you two is,” Finn stops and waves his free hand vaguely, drink sploshing around in his cup.

“Effortless?” Poe supplies, smirking and smiling broadly.

“Yeah,” Finn agrees.

“Usually,” Rey adds as the song changes, because: “is this really _disco_?”

“Hey, it’s prom!” Poe says, blushing a little. “I thought it was appropriate.”

“Is this where you tell us a story about Studio 54 again?” Finn asks.

“All about _Luke Skywalker_ ,” Rey suggests, laughing.

“We’re dancing!” Poe says, protesting. Finn does a sloppy and joking sort of disco move then, the kind they’ve seen in the old movies and footage, and Rey laughs harder and Poe finishes his whole drink in one gulp to hide how his eyes are gleaming.

Rey thinks she’s never had anything like this either, never felt better around other people before, never liked every single thing about someone they way she does about the two of them. She’s never--maybe she’s never loved anyone before, never had family or friends to love, and she doesn’t know what that means or how she means it, but she’s sure it must feel like this. Loving people, her people, must feel like having the two of them. She’s always surprised by how much she likes it.

She attempts a disco move of her own, which Poe tries as well, which continues into the next few songs even though they are very much not disco, and Rey finishes her drink and dances closer, laughter standing in for words through the end of the playlist.

And then they’re collapsed on the couch, and she throws herself over both of them, on their laps, letting Finn play with her hair and tell her she _looks really pretty tonight_ , with bleary eyes and a sincere smile--so she kisses him, she kisses him until she can taste the vodka in his mouth and his hands are in her hair, until they’re pulling back and smiling at each other. Rey bites her lip when Finn leans into Poe, when she watches them kiss, the pull in her stomach somehow more intense than ever.

She thinks, probably ridiculously, that Poe sliding a hand on Finn’s face is almost like it’s _for her_ somehow, even though that’s silly because it’s clearly for the two of them. Not even that--it’s for alcohol and fun and the swimming in her brain and--she can’t work it out, much as she tries. She can’t work out why she likes watching them kiss just as much as she likes kissing both of them. She doesn’t know why that is, doesn’t even know what to think about it.

But then, when Poe reaches out for her--a hand on her leg right above her boots that is somehow light and casual even as she’s so aware, so _deliciously_ , stomach-pullingly aware of it--and they’re kissing, too, she sees a flash in Finn’s eyes. She’s kissing Poe, and there’s this thing she catches in Finn’s eyes like maybe he could be thinking it too, about kissing people and then seeing those people kiss each other. When those people are the three of them, anyway. It’s still all somehow casual even as it’s not, a low heat and squirm in Rey that she sort of wants to keep right where it is. Poe kisses her cheek and her forehead when he pulls back, and they’re still all laughing and smiling at each other and Rey wants--

Well, she _wants_ to kiss them both over and over again and watch them kiss each other, and then, if. She’s warm everywhere and she’s very much trying not to shift around too much, because here on their laps she thinks they’re also, maybe--

But she doesn’t want to do anything about it, not now. She thinks about other teen cliches, but she also thinks she wants to keep this tipsy haze, this moment with the two of them and this happy bubble, light. She thinks maybe they all need that--that it needs to be just this, not just because they’re drunk and that’s not really a decision they should make now, but for bigger reasons she doesn’t know how to put into words yet.

So she leans in and gives them each in turn another kiss, messy and mostly joking, and then gets up, even if it’s a little difficult and she’s kind of dizzy. She thinks they should all step outside and smoke some of Poe’s cigarettes now and then maybe collapse and get some sleep.

And when they do just that, pull out the couch and sleep all in a pile on each other, Rey thinks it absolutely feels like a step toward something, toward a place they’re all headed.

If this is what growing up feels like, she thinks as she drifts off? Then she’s glad they’re doing it together.

*

It’s not that Poe has never been to Manhattan--it’s just that he was all of about ten the last time, and this is so different, already so much more on the first day alone, that it feels like a different experience entirely. It’s all he can do just to walk at a normal pace down the busy streets and not shout his words over the hum of traffic. Finn and Rey had let him plan all the must-visits, let him write out a list of things they had to do and see. Poe wants to do _everything_ , wants more than they can possibly fit in, wants to spend an entire day soaking up each and every place on the list.

The first thing--the very first thing on the itinerary for their first full morning--is that they have to go to the spot of the old Millennium Falcon.

He knows what they’ll find when they get there. He’s knows it’s been a Pinkberry for years now, but it still jolts him and looks all distorted and out of place when actually see it, the tacky pink and green logo plastered over where the Falcon’s famous entrance sign used to be. He stands in front of it and closes his eyes for a second and tries to feel it anyway, though, tries to imagine standing on this sidewalk forty years ago waiting for a show from some no-names who might go on to be legends on his watch.

“Do you want to go in?” Finn asks after a minute.

Poe frowns. He’s been thinking about that. Because, on the one hand, they’d be _inside the Falcon_ , but on the other, they’d have to give money to Pinkberry for that, and Poe just. He can’t do that, and he knows it wouldn’t be the same at all, anyway. When it was either of the restaurants it had been in between being the actual Falcon and the Pinkberry, Poe would have eaten there happily. Apparently, the original buyers had been friends of Han Solo’s, and the first restaurant had kept much of the old vibe and decor, but this--

“No,” Poe says, glancing through the windows at the totally flipped interior, the shiny walls and round tables and neat rows of frozen yogurt toppings. He links his arms through Finn’s and Rey’s and tells them, “whatever, it’s not really here at all anymore. Let’s keep walking.”

What is still there--at least, sort of--is Resistance Records, even if it’s just the shop now ever since the label closed down. So they head down the block and around the corner to it next.

That ends up taking up the better part of their morning, because it’s maybe the coolest fucking place Poe’s ever been to. It’s not a big store--a lot smaller than Poe had been imagining from the photos--but it’s full of things he’s never seen physical copies of before. Finn keeps excitedly picking up copies of things and bringing them over to Rey, which keeps earning them fond looks from the cashier and makes Poe feel relieved they’re clearly enjoying it as much as he is. They’ve already decided they’re going to buy something while they’re here, mostly for the bag. They end up with a copy of _Parklife_ that Poe already owns but that Rey had been protesting she wanted to take with her in the fall now that she has her own record player, a graduation gift from his dad. Poe also buys a couple of magazines with interviews from a few years ago in them, even though he knows by heart what they all say. It feels like an important thing to have in his hands, a real copy.

He notices, with a grin, that there are no copies of _As Long As There’s Light We’ve Still Got A Chance_ around with the other books and memorabilia, and when he asks about it at checkout, the guy gives him a knowing smile and tells him that’s very deliberate.

“That’s the bad book, right?” Rey asks, once they’re outside, whispering and looking over her shoulder as if the cashier might still hear them. Poe nods.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “I’d heard it wasn’t endorsed by anyone actually in the know, but it’s good to get confirmation, I guess.” He’s seen speculation that the book was a direct attempt to derail Leia’s first Senate campaign.

(He’s seen speculation of. A lot of things. All he really knows is that, in the wake of its publication, Han Solo had snapped at some journalist pressing for details and told them, for fuck’s sake, the fact that he was bisexual really wasn’t some great mystery he’d been hiding all these years. It felt incredibly important to Poe at the time, to hear Han Solo tell someone _see you in hell_ in response to yet another vague implication of _secret gay affairs making his marriage a lie_ , and it still does, even now, even if that’s not the label he’s mostly settled on for himself. It had still been a big moment, in ways he’s only starting to understand now.)

They spend another hour at Trash and Vaudeville, Rey insisting on trying on at least eight pairs of pants, which neither he nor Finn really mind as much as their protesting would suggest. Poe can’t stop thinking about staying, about forgetting about college and being here forever, about spending his life browsing records and trying on clothes with Finn and Rey. It’s a life he feels like he could almost touch, watching Rey grin as she models a pair of of the most ridiculous-looking pants he’s ever seen, zippers and buckles dragging on the floor around her. Rey also looks covetously at half the shoes, and Poe runs his hands over actual things he’d once bookmarked on his laptop wistfully, Finn giving each of their choices a thumbs up or down.

The rest of their money is reserved, though, for dinner and their next stop and whatever’s left over, because they’ve decided to get tattoos here instead of at home, despite the cost. Finn looks decidedly nervous outside the shop, and Poe reaches out a hand to halt him at the entrance.

“You don’t have to, you know?” Poe says, studying Finn, who shakes his head quickly.

“I’ve watched you get them, I’m basically a pro, an expert!” Finn says, in that quick, nervous way he has about him sometimes.

“Not the same,” Rey says, catching Poe’s eye.

“I want to,” Finn says, more firmly, nodding like he means it. Poe grins. The tattoos hadn’t even been his idea--they’d been Rey’s--and he doesn’t really worry anymore that Finn would ever do something he was uncomfortable with just for the two of them, just because he felt like he had to. He thinks he and Rey are pretty good at telling when Finn is uncomfortable, so they’d know anyway. He likes to check in and make sure, still.

“Okay,” Poe says, not moving his hand off Finn’s arm as he does.

“I might need you both to hold my hand, though,” Finn says. “So I can have something to hold onto when it hurts.”

“Done and done,” Rey says.

“Anytime,” Poe says, winking a little as he does.

Finn actually insists on going first--probably so that he doesn’t lose his nerve for it, Poe thinks--and they do hold his hands the whole way through. He’s grateful the tattoo artist doesn’t seem to think twice about it, although Poe knows they’d still do it anyway. He squeezes Finn’s hand and watches lines and shapes appear under his shoulder blade, traces them over and over again with his eyes and notices Rey doing the same.

(He keeps thinking about kissing Finn, as he watches the tattoo artist finishing up, keeps thinking about kissing him to give Finn something to channel the pain into instead of just handholds. He doesn’t know if that makes no sense at all, or if it makes all the sense in the world. He settles on leaning in to whisper occasional encouraging things until it’s all over, unable to fully shake the images from his mind, not necessarily trying all that hard to, either.)

Rey goes next, and they hold her hands too, something she would have protested months ago but doesn’t now, and Poe sucks in a long breath watching. He thinks it’s good he’s long stopped worrying too much about the fact that it’s the same--that he watches Rey and he sees the same things as with Finn in his mind, eyes tracing skin and kissing. He thinks it should still be something he’s more confused about than he is. That he not only feels the same about both of them, but that he feels it all at once, this same way about both of them at the same time. He’s mostly just accepted it, like a constant thing, an everyday fact. He doesn’t know what that’s ever going to mean for him, for them, but he thinks there wasn’t much he could’ve done about it, really.

He’s gotten too many tattoos now to really need anyone to hold his hand, but he can’t say he minds when it’s his turn when Finn and Rey reach out for him. He thinks it might be hard to do it any other way from now on. He’ll have trouble not wanting the pressure of them on either side of of him, Finn’s whispers in his ear and the hand Rey keeps running around the base of his neck under his hair. He thinks he’ll have trouble not wanting both of them, full stop, in all possible ways, from now on. It’s a giant thought for this giant day in this giant fucking city, and now isn’t the time but he thinks it anyway, squeezing their hands back.

He never wants to leave Manhattan.

*

They’d considered staying out, seeing where they could get in with fake IDs and slipping into the New York nightlife--but in practice, they’re so tired they can hardly stand anymore by eleven. It’s a little surprising, all things considered, that it’s Poe who points out they’ll be able to do more tomorrow if they actually sleep, and Finn nods gratefully for it. His head is buzzing and his back is sore under its bandage and he feels like his heartbeat is speeding, even though his limbs are heavy and his feet ache a hundred times more than from the most intense track workout.

They head back to their hotel--more of a motel, if they’re being generous, but it’d had decent reviews and king-sized beds and was actually priced as advertised, which was enough. (A nicer place a few blocks down had added another $98 fee when they’d selected three adults instead of two, and Finn is still trying to figure out why that had bothered him beyond what the total would’ve done to their trip budget.) Rey’s arms are linked through Finn’s and Poe’s when they walk through the dingy little lobby to the elevators, and Finn can’t stop beaming about the way no one seems to be paying them any attention.

The walls are a little off-colored and the mattress sags like it’s seen better days, but the locks all work and the sink doesn’t drip or anything, so he can’t complain. They’re actually _here_ , in Manhattan, just the three of them, and that’s really what matters. Honestly, Finn’s pretty sure that Poe at least sort of likes that the place is a little run down--he’s got this gleam in his eyes, even now, so tired, and he’s taken pictures of the bars over the windows and the paint chips in the floorboard. It probably fits with the New York Poe holds in his head, Finn thinks, and really, that New York is why they’re here in the first place.

Rey strips down to her t-shirt and throws herself onto the squeaky bed, right in the middle, yawning outrageously as she does.

“Come sleep,” she calls. Finn grins and meets Poe’s eyes.

“You have to wash your tattoo, you know,” Finn reminds her, and Rey grumbles at him and heads for the bathroom before either of them can. Finn gets ready for bed himself, admittedly much quicker than he normally would, but not fast enough to keep Rey--who bounds back from the bathroom and into bed while Poe and Finn are still pulling out pajama pants--from calling out three more times. Poe makes it a few minutes after he does, and Rey makes a pleased little sound when they’re both in bed with her.

They all fit into the bed surprisingly well, Finn thinks. He’d been a little worried about that. Not that they haven’t shared a bed before, but this had felt like it should be different, maybe. Finn rolls on his side to look at Poe and Rey: Poe’s eyes still gleaming like this is just what he wanted, Rey’s closed but a contented smile on her face. He toes are poking into Finn’s ankles a little. He’s pretty sure she knows it. He can’t bring himself to tell her to cut it out.

It’s loud outside, so much louder than it ever is at home. Even with the lights off, there are street lights and car lights coming in the window, catching their faces, keeping Finn awake with fast thoughts for just a bit longer, despite the protest from the slow-growing headache behind his eyes.

“This is so great,” Poe says. “I could stay forever.”

“In bed or Manhattan?” Rey asks, eyebrows raising. Poe shoves at her playfully a little, so she rolls off her back and onto her hip, burying her head into Finn’s side as she does.

“I wanted to be over here, anyway,” Rey mutters.

“Be that way,” Poe says, laughing again, a yawn with it this time, “but Finn’s on my side here.”

“I'm not even sure what we’re taking sides on,” Finn says. Rey huffs a little breath into his side, making the fabric of his shirt move.

“New York,” Poe says, with that reverent tone in his voice he gets sometimes, shaking his head and then rolling on his own side so he’s facing Finn. He slings an arm over Rey, grinning broadly. Down the bed, Finn can feel both their feet tangling with his now, sending shivers up him that even, as tired as he is, make him think.

“We saw so much today,” Finn says. With Rey and Poe’s feet on his, his brain is spinning all of a sudden--a thought pulled from a string he’s always had, a spiral he goes down sometimes. He’s thinking about earlier today, after tattoos and before dinner and the way they’d tried their best to keep quiet and mature faces at the Museum of Sex, and he’s thinking about all the parts he doesn’t know whether or not are relevant to him, he thinks they _are_ but he’s--he’s thinking about this, them snuggled in this bed, he’s thinking about how he knows in these moments, in so many moments that they’re not. _Friends_. He knows when he says he loves them it more means he’s _in love_ with them, and thinks he should maybe be the one to say that.

He knows, he’s seen, his fingers shaking as he’s typed search terms into his browser at three in the morning, that people do this, that sometimes you fall in love and don’t have to _choose_.

“Hey, you alright?” Poe asks, studying his face with that look like he has, the one that’s like he’s watching how fast Finn’s mind is going. Rey opens one eye without moving and looks up at him too.

“Finn?” she says. Finn sighs and shakes his head.

“Just thinking,” he responds. “You know, I was thinking--since we went to that sex museum, about. Labels and words and stuff,” Finn says, which is true and part of it, but--

“What about them?” Poe asks.

“That I’m. Never sure, I guess,” Finn says, biting his lip. Rey closes her eyes again, but she’s clearly listening.

“You don’t have to be,” Poe says, with a shrug of his shoulder that Rey uses to snuggle further between the two of them. “Sometimes labels are good, but sometimes they’re not. I like pansexual, because it makes sense to me, you know? I read up on it or hear people talk about it or whatever, and it sounds right, feels like me, but. You don’t have to.”

“I mean--I think I know what I’m not,” Finn says, waving a hand. He does, although sometimes he thinks so much of that is tied up in Rey and Poe and the things he can’t really deny feeling about both of them, so maybe that’s something he needs to figure out first.

“Sounds like as a good a start as any,” Poe says, grinning at him. On the arm he’s got around Rey, Finn can trace three different tattoos with his eyes, not counting today’s. It’s a steadily-increasing stream Poe’s been getting since his birthday, and for a second, the urge to trace them with fingers is so strong that Finn reaches out and grabs for Poe’s hand instead, lacing their fingers and making Poe smile again.

“Yeah, I know,” Finn says, yawning. He still feels dead tired and wide awake all at once.

“Well, I have no fucking clue,” Rey says, sounding mostly asleep, voice muffled against Finn’s side, and then she yawns too and so does Poe and the conversation fades away into steady breathing. He’s halfway asleep when Rey mumbles, “I just know I’m into both of you,” into his shoulder like she’s finishing her thought, her voice so heavy that Finn isn’t sure she’s aware she’s said that out loud.

“You have good taste,” Poe whispers back, heavy too.

Finn doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t say a word. He just shifts closer to both of them, tangling them even tighter, and thinks that maybe he won’t be the one that has to say it one of these days after all. He thinks he shouldn’t be surprised. Poe and Rey have a way of doing that, of making scary things make more sense for him. Finn thinks loving them is easy-- _effortless_ , like Poe had said at prom, is a good word for it--and he thinks for all the things he’s gained, for all the changes he’s made, it’s the one that makes him feel most of all like he’s finally breathing.

*

There is a lull, a few weeks once they’re back from their trip before semesters start for anyone, and they mostly spend it Poe’s room. Mr. Dameron hasn’t really been enforcing room rules so much anymore (“you two can call me _Kes_ , you know,” he’d told them the week before, and Rey had thought back to stilted introductions at foster homes, rolling the name around in her mouth and thinking about him saying they weren’t really _kids_ now), and Finn’s mostly just been going home to sleep, so most of their days have been spent lounging around and listening to music like they always do.

Except Rey feels like she keeps touching both of them--like she _has_ to keep touching them, because soon, every day won’t be like this. She’s honestly not sure she’s ready. The distance that fall will put between them feels massive, and even though they have it all planned out and she’ll see them all the time, she already misses days like today as they slip away, one by one. She already misses the two of them, intensely.

They seem to be feeling it, too, and as much as she wants everything that’s about to happen, she wants even more to slow August down and make it _stop_. She wants to hold onto this and them for as long as she can. Sometimes, Finn says _come with us_ in a way that is only sort of joking, and sometimes she thinks Poe is shaking a little when he hugs her or slings an arm around her, like he’s holding on too, like he’s not ready either.

But she can’t go with them, and they all know that and it will be fine. Really, it will.

Rey has spent so much of her life basically alone, and this is different--this is _her_ leaving, and this is a good thing, an actual good reason to move forward. She knows they’ll make it all work, even though she knows people split up with their high school friends, or _whatevers_ , knows after college starts you move on and you drift apart and it’s okay. She also thinks this is different. It’s a feeling she can’t shake, and maybe everyone says that the summer after graduation, but she plans to do everything she possibly can to keep this.

It’s a slow afternoon when they’re all pretending to help Poe pack up his room, mostly talking and pulling out things to try them on or tell stories about them, that Rey’s fingers pause on the jacket in Poe’s closet.

The jacket, from the first day Poe and Finn had met, Poe’s jacket that somehow led them to right here. It’s made its way back to Poe’s closet--although she thinks that was only because Finn had slept over a spring night when it was cold and then forgotten it the next morning, and most of the days after had been too warm and bright to give it a second thought. She pulls it out and turns to them, thinking. It’s more beat up these days, a jacket that had been threadbare the first time she’d put it on, and she slides it on now, smiling. There’s a large tear creeping up the seam of the right sleeve, and she puts her fingers through it, thinking.

“Your jacket has a rip,” Rey says, looking at Poe.

“I know,” he says, sounding sad.

“I didn’t do that, did I?” Finn asks. Poe shakes his head.

“Eh, it’s old, rips easy--that one was BB-8, actually,” Poe says. “I can’t get rid of it, though.”

“We should share it!” Finn says, and Rey beams at him, because that’s exactly what she’d been thinking.

“We already do,” Poe says.

“No, like,” Finn starts, “if it’s already ripped, we should.” He looks at Rey, who nods. “Share it.”

“We can each have a piece--something for us all to wear, even,” Rey says, stopping herself from adding take with us to that. Finn comes and stands close to her, fingers playing with the rip over her arm.

“Oh,” Poe says, slowly, “oh. Yeah.”

“It’s your jacket! You can say no,” Finn says. Poe shakes his head quickly at that.

“Let’s do it,” he says, coming over to stand next to them. Rey shrugs out of the jacket and sets it on Poe’s desk, considering. She runs her fingers over the soft fabric and tries to decide what she wants.

“You can keep most of it--if we just cut the sleeves off, maybe? I think I want bands, or gloves, for around my wrists, I want to be able to touch the fabric, for when I.” Finn trails off, and Poe nods, reaching out and running a thumb on Finn’s wrist like he knows exactly what Finn means, too.

“We can get whatever parts we need to make that work at a craft store, I think,” Poe says, and Rey smiles.

“I think,” Rey pauses and fidgets with the cord necklace she has on, and decides that braided pieces like that would be good, would feel like something she could take with her of the feeling of the three of them all braided together on Poe’s bed. “Could we make something sort of like this out of leather?”

“I think so,” Poe says, nodding again. She holds the cord out to him with her thumb, and he runs his fingers over it, skimming her neck a little as he does. She tries not to shiver at it and swallows, even when he settles that hand on her neck, cupping a little, still holding Finn’s hand. Rey reaches out and grabs Finn’s other hand.

“A united front?” Finn says sarcastically, but Rey can hear the emotion in the joke. They stand like that for a minute, all breathing in a way that sounds suspiciously like everyone’s holding back some emotion.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Rey says after a minute, turning around and turning back to the task at hand. She opens Poe’s desk drawer--knowing where the scissors are without asking-- and says to Poe, “want to do the honors?”

“No, Finn should,” Poe says instantly. Rey smiles. Poe’s right: there’s something that only seems fitting about Finn being the one to do it.

“He absolutely should,” Rey says. She passes the scissors to Finn, who nods like it’s serious business, being appointed for such a task.

“Just the sleeves?” Finn says.

“Go for it,” Poe says, putting a hand on his shoulder and locking eyes with Rey. Finn turns the jacket sleeves inside out carefully, and then starts to do just that. The cut’s a little rough--the scissors aren’t really meant for this, but the jacket is older and the fabric is weak, and the sleeves fall to the floor from their hems, one by one.

By two days later, she’s got a leather cord around her neck and two more as spares in her backpack. Finn’s got leather cuffs with holes for his thumbs that he can wear anytime he needs, and Poe hasn’t taken the vest they’ve created from it off all day, even if it’s ninety degrees out and the edges are still frayed. He keeps touching it, the way she keeps touching the cord and Finn keeps touching his wrists, and touching it is not the same as touching each other, she knows, but--

But when they’re hours away and she needs to remember she’s not really alone, when it’s days or weeks before she’ll see them again and she needs to know they’ll be back, that they’ll always come back together--

This will help a lot, Rey thinks. More, somehow, than even the ink in her skin and her brightest burned memories of them. This will keep them close when they’re not with her. And she knows she’ll need that. The cord makes her feel, when she touches it, like she belongs somewhere, belongs to people, has a place. She didn’t know something so simple as leather around her neck could do that.

She’s not alone--she doesn’t have to be alone anymore--and this feels like a promise of that. A promise they’ll never let each other be alone, a promise that Rey is leaving but not being left this time.

It’s a promise she lets herself believe for all three of them.


	5. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's the final section! (Until it's time to jump back to 1977, anyway...)

There is a stack of four application packets square in the middle of Leia’s desk, right next to coffee that, miraculously, actually smells fresh. She’s three months late in picking an intern for the campaign run-up, mostly because the last one had gone home to Indiana in the middle of April with no notice and a troubling number of campaign files saved on their laptop.

To say it had been a headache would be an understatement.

There had been talk about just not doing it this year, but the funding had already been secured, and it’s honestly too important to her to cancel altogether. So it’s just. Late, this time around. She hopes whoever she selects hasn’t already accepted something else they can’t back out of or isn’t willing to come on board for what could turn out to be less than the promised full year once everything is settled. Leia always insists on handling this sort of thing, the final selection--not that without an intern, her campaign staff extends much past people personally invested--but she thinks it’s vital to make this choice herself.

On top of the stack on her desk, the final four, there is a Post-it note in Han’s handwriting on the one on top that reads:

_This one? Check him out. Pretty green, but I think there’s something there._

Leia laughs softly and purposefully reads the other three first, scanning accomplishments, grade point averages, and professional, polished-sounding answers. She pulls a favorite from the pile and sets the other two aside before picking up this one Han apparently likes best. Her eyebrows raise as she reads, smiling in amusement at places. This application is so _young_ sounding, so green and hopeful and authentic, so very much less qualified than the other three had been. The answers sound a lot less like someone’s department advisor had proofed them--if not written them, honestly--and a lot more like, well, a teenager sitting behind a laptop, trying to sound impressive. She is reminded of herself, or herself at that age, in ways she can’t quite pin down.

There are sections where this applicant quotes her back at herself--things she hardly remembers saying, did she?--and there are places where ideas trail off, or where stories seem half finished. In every word of it, she can tell this one _means it_ , that they didn’t apply for ten other internships because of how they would look for future qualifications. She smiles and takes a long sip of coffee.

The last intern had been exceptionally qualified, had given perfect answers, had had prior experience in politics, even. And that had ended so disappointingly. Leia thinks trying something different might be just what this campaign needs, thinks for a moment that taking a chance on some kid with no experience might just pay off. She’s never exactly been known for traditional choices, and, she thinks, now is no time to change that.

She slides the other three applications away and reads over her choice again, smiling to herself as she does.

The acceptance packet gets sent out before the end of the day.

*

Poe doesn’t notice the giant packet sitting by his front door at first, but Rey does. The three of them are coming in from some shopping, things they’ll need in just a few weeks now, even if he and Finn still haven’t sent back their copy of the signed apartment lease yet. Rey stops dead in her tracks at the door, making Finn and Poe slow too, when they notice.

“Poe?” Rey says, voice low and urgent. Poe spins and follows to where she is pointing to the floor, her eyes wide, and--

The manila mailer is stamped with the New York state seal and the return address of Organa for Senate. Finn lets out an audible gasp next to him. Poe tries to tell himself, even as his heart is pounding in his ears, that’s it’s probably just the first round of campaign stickers for this election cycle or something, that he’s just on their mailing list and he’s been sent information on the campaign itself. He tells himself not to think too much, not to expect anything, because there is no way. Decisions were supposed to be made months ago, and his chances were next to nothing anyway, and there is _no way_ , there is absolutely no way that--

It is.

It’s from the Organa campaign. No. It’s from actual fucking _Leia Organa_ herself and it’s about his application and all he can read is that he’s been _chosen_ , before he has to sit down because the words are blurring and the room is spinning or maybe that’s just his mind and--

“No fucking way,” Poe says, sitting on the floor, or maybe more collapsing onto it, too overwhelmed to bother trying to head for a chair. He hands the letter to Finn with shaking hands and Rey grabs for the rest of the packet, pulling out information he assumes is about all the logistics, because he. He _got it_. Rey and Finn tackle him a second later, just both pile right on him, right there on his floor.

“Poe,” Rey says again, this time like she can hardly contain herself, “oh. My. God.”

“I knew it,” Finn says, “I felt it. I just knew you’d get it.”

“I got it,” Poe says, whispers, into Finn’s shoulder, reaching out his hands to grab at both of them because he feels like he needs to. He sits up slowly when he’s able, reaching back to actually read things, to actually look at what’s happened. Finn and Rey sit on either side of him, looking sort of like he feels.

“You’re coming, right?” Poe says, turning his eyes to Finn, because it’s something to grab onto right now, something he can focus on beyond the parts of him are that are sure this is an extended fever dream from the flu he’d been fighting last week, all just a fantasy in his head.

“There are store locations in Manhattan, too,” Finn says back, like maybe he did always know it, like maybe he’s had a backup plan Poe wouldn’t let himself even consider.

“Good,” Poe says.

“It’s actually easier to get into Manhattan for me, a faster bus, and trains, too,” Rey says, grinning sideways at him in a way he knows by now means _proud_.

“Right,” Poe says. He thinks there are a million things to figure out, a million details, but that none of them matter because he actually got it. Because there is an actual invitation in his hand to be part of everything he’s wanted for so long. There is a piece of paper that says he gets to meet his idol--no, not meet, to _work for_ , work with Leia Organa the real person, the actual woman behind those songs and that scene. A piece of paper that says he was picked. That says he gets to do so much more than all those gen eds he’s already signed up for. That says this impossible, nonsense, entirely escapist dream he’s had is actually coming true, and it’s dizzying and wonderful and absolutely terrifying all at once. He knows it’s ridiculous, but he thinks it’s all because of them somehow, like it never would have happened without Rey and Finn in his life, and all he wants to do is take them with him to New York.

“Congratulations,” Rey offers, sincerely.

“I really didn’t think,” Poe says, trailing off.

“I did,” Rey says.

“Me too,” Finn agrees.

Poe swallows and reaches for both of their hands, squeezing them. In a minute here, he needs to call his dad at the station and tell him the news, and then they should all actually figure out the details of it all, sit down and talk about what this means. For now, though, for right this minute, he needs _them_ , he needs to take a breath for just the three of them.

He may never get to stand in the Millennium Falcon and kiss a stranger to to the sound of punk music, he thinks, but he’s not sure if that would’ve been everything he’d hoped it would be, if he’d actually been there, if he’d actually had it for real. Now, he actually does have this, he actually gets to help in some small way with the Organa for Senate campaign, and he gets to do that with Finn and Rey still beside him, and that’s probably even better, he supposes.

Maybe, he thinks, running his hands over the letter again to convince himself it’s real, that this time?

Maybe this is his movement to be a part of.

**Author's Note:**

> This is hardly the end of the story, either in 2015 or 1977--there's plenty more to come for the new and old trios. Follow the fic on Tumblr at [soundoftherebelunderground](http://soundoftherebelunderground.tumblr.com)! We'll be posting new updates there as well as here (along with anecdotes and other things that don't fit into the structure of the larger fic), along with a lot additional content (companion playlists, aesthetics, etc.).


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